I want to write PL/SQL to test a function in a package. The package defines a cursor type
TYPE ref_cursor IS REF CURSOR;
I want to define a record based on that type.
My code is:
DECLARE
cur PACKAGE_NAME.ref_cursor;
rec cur%ROWTYPE;
why is last line not correct?
You can't define a record type based on a weakly-typed REF CURSOR. Since the cursor type defined in the package can be used to return data from an arbitrary query with arbitrary columns, the PL/SQL compiler can't determine an appropriate record type to fetch the data into.
If you know the actual data being returned from the function, you could declare a record of that type to fetch the data into. For example, if I declare a function that returns a weakly-typed cursor type but I know that the cursor really returns a cursor based on the EMP
table, I can fetch the data into an EMP%ROWTYPE
record (note that SYS_REFCURSOR
is a system-defined weakly-typed REF CURSOR type)
create or replace function f1
return sys_refcursor
is
l_rc sys_refcursor;
begin
open l_rc
for select *
from emp;
return l_rc;
end;
declare
l_rc sys_refcursor;
l_emp emp%rowtype;
begin
l_rc := f1;
loop
fetch l_rc into l_emp;
exit when l_rc%notfound;
dbms_output.put_line( l_emp.empno );
end loop;
end;