Pass different # of parameters to a procedure?

Hi Everyone,

I'm confronted with a situation where we're wanting to create a stored procedure that will accept different numbers of IN parameters. Specifically, it could execute with, say 2 parameters supplied or 5 parameters supplied to it.

We've considered overloading a package, and that remains an option, but there are quite a few possible combinations of parameters that the procedure could receive.
It is supposed to take the parameters it gets and then update a table, changing the fields in a table for which it has received a parameter while leaving all others at their original value. Because of this requirement, simply providing a default value won't work because we don't want the update statement to change column values to their default if they already had a value prior to the update.

Sheesh! Normally I'm pretty good with words but I'm failing miserably trying to explain this.
As far as I know my only choices are:
1. Supply a value to every IN parameter
2. Supply values to some parameters and let the others use a default value.
3. Overload the procedure in a package.

Any help on this?
Thanks in advance for ideas..its version 8.1. S

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Before you buy. Received on Thu Oct 12 2000 - 14:45:09 CDT