Re: PL/SQL Arrays

>>>I'm not sure I like this solution since anybody could screw with that
>>>variable and change the default behavior of that procedure in their
>>>session. However, that might actually be desirable in some situations.
>>
>>
>> I ran into the same problem, with the same solution. To avoid
>> problems from other code changing the variable, you could declare
>> empty_numarray as a constant within the package.
>
>I don't see how this will work. When you try to make it a constant,
>it's going to require an initialization. That puts us right back to the
>original problem as far as I can see. Namely, how do you write a value
>declaration for an index by array?

I was going from memory, didn't have the source I used. I believe what I actually did was to make a packaged function that returned an uninitialized nested table, and called that in the initialization clause, either for a constant nested table in the package, or in a DEFAULT clause on a parameter.

The situation I had was a web form containing several checkboxes, all with the same name. The PL/SQL procedure that processes the results from this form gets a nested table with an arbitrary number of VARCHAR2s. No problem if the user selected 1 or more checkboxes. But if they didn't select any, the procedure doesn't receive anything for that parameter and will throw an uncatchable exception. Unless there's a DEFAULT clause on the parameter, and that's where a packaged function returning an uninitialized nested table comes in.

John

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