Question

Hello I’m a bit baffled that the cursor I have in this function is only returning the top row.

I’ve been comparing it to a few different examples I’ve seen and I just don’t see what’s wrong. Any guidance is greatly appreciated.

FUNCTION FS_A_FUNCTION
(
    inDate DATE
)
RETURN VARCHAR2 IS

tAnswer     VARCHAR2(1)  := 'N';
tDates DATE;

CURSOR c1 IS

SELECT S.Dates FROM A_TABLE S;

BEGIN 
OPEN c1;
LOOP
    FETCH c1 INTO tDates;
    EXIT WHEN c1%NOTFOUND;
END LOOP;
CLOSE c1;

IF inDate IN (tDates) THEN
tAnswer := 'Y';

END IF;

RETURN (tAnswer);


END FS_A_FUNCTION

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Not quite sure what you’re expecting to happen. After your loop tDates will have a single value from whichever row the cursor saw last. As your select doesn’t have an order by, that could be any value from your table. I think you may mean to be checking the value against inDate inside the loop.

I’m not sure why you’re using a cursor at all, unless the real logic is more complicated. If you’re doing what I think, you could just do something like:

FUNCTION FS_A_FUNCTION
(
    inDate DATE
)
RETURN VARCHAR2 IS
    tAnswer VARCHAR2(1);
BEGIN
    select decode(max(dates), null, 'N', 'Y')
    into tAnswer
    from a_table
    where dates = inDate;

    RETURN tAnswer;
END FS_A_FUNCTION;

… or maybe a bit clearer bu the same logic:

FUNCTION FS_A_FUNCTION
(
    inDate DATE
)
RETURN VARCHAR2 IS
    tDates DATE;
BEGIN
    select max(dates)
    into tDates
    from a_table
    where dates = inDate;

    IF tDates IS NULL THEN
        RETURN 'N';
    ELSE
        RETURN 'Y';
    END IF;
END FS_A_FUNCTION;

In both cases I’m using max() in case there are multiple rows with the same date.