Question

I am using the Oracle system tables to get some metadata about the Packages in our database.

Here is one of my queries:

select AP.PROCEDURE_NAME
  from ALL_PROCEDURES ap
 where ap.object_name = :object_name
   and ap.owner=:owner
   and ap.procedure_name is not NULL
   and ap.procedure_name like :procedure_name

I also want to find out if the given object is either a function, a procedure or a type. I can’t seem to find a direct way to pull the data directly from a table.

Please Note: I don’t want to have to parse it from all_sources.

Answer 1

It turns out that there is a view all_arguments where you can get all the parameters for a method in a package. When the method is a function there is an argument with a null name representing the return value. So if you join against all_arguments you can determine if a given all_procedures entry is a function or a procedure. What follows is an example showing such a select.

select CASE (Select count(*) from ALL_ARGUMENTS aa 
                       where aa.object_name=ap.procedure_name
                         and aa.object_id = ap.object_id 
                         and argument_name is null)
         WHEN 1 THEN 'FUNCTION'
         WHEN 0 THEN 'PROCEDURE'
         ELSE ''
       END as is_function, ap.*
  from all_procedures ap
 where ap.object_name like '<package name>'