Question

I am trying to write a stored procedure that inserts a row into an employee table. If the department does not exist, that department needs to be inserted into the departments table. I have the following code:

drop table employees;
drop table departments;

create table departments(
dept            varchar2(30),
dept_number     number,
dept_city       varchar2(30),
CONSTRAINT pk_dept PRIMARY KEY(dept)
);

create table employees( 
dept            varchar2(30),
employee_name   varchar2(40),
employee_id     number,
CONSTRAINT pk_id PRIMARY KEY(employee_id),
CONSTRAINT fk_dept FOREIGN KEY (dept) REFERENCES departments(dept)
);


CREATE  OR REPLACE PROCEDURE employeeadd(
a_dept    IN  VARCHAR2,
a_employee_name    IN VARCHAR2,
a_employee_id    IN NUMBER)
as
    li_count    NUMBER;
BEGIN
sp_check_dept(a_dept, li_count);    
if li_count = 0 then
INSERT INTO departments (dept) values (a_dept);
    return;
end if;
INSERT INTO employee values (a_dept, a_employee_name, a_employee_id);
end;
/

create or replace procedure sp_check_dept(a_dept IN NUMBER,
                        a_count  OUT NUMBER)
as
begin
    select count(*)
into a_count
from departments
where dept_number = a_dept;
end;
/

When I run my execute statement as execute employeeadd(‘marketing’, ‘john’, 10); I get the following errors. I can’t seem to figure out how to get past the errors and/or write this correctly:

ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error: character to number conversion error
ORA-06512: at “employeeadd”, line 8
ORA-06512: at line 1

Answer 1

Why is li_count declared outside the BEGIN…END block? Do you need to assign it before sending it as an argument to sp_check_dept()?

Edit: Just saw your followup comment: sp_check_dept is expecting a number as its first parameter; you have declared a_dept as VARCHAR.