Question

I have a procedure defined as:

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE foo (
  AS_OF_DATE_IN IN DATE DEFAULT TRUNC(sysdate)-1
) AS ...

Which can be executed in these manners:

-- passes '11-NOV-2011'
exec foo('11-NOV-2011');

--set DEFAULT value (yesterday's date)
exec foo();

--makes things more difficult, as default value isn't set
exec foo(NULL);

What I want to do is:

AS_OF_DATE_IN:=NVL(AS_OF_DATE_IN, TRUNC(sysdate)-1);

but it generates a reassignment error.

Other than wrapping all usages of AS_OF_DATE_IN with NVL(), is there a more-efficient way to handle this situation?

** edit **
I made a fairly stupid mistake–I’m writing a procedure, not a function. The procedure doesn’t return a value.

Answer 1

You can use a local variable inside the function:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION foo (
  AS_OF_DATE_IN IN DATE DEFAULT TRUNC(sysdate)-1
) RETURN ??? AS 
    V_AS_OF_DATE DATE DEFAULT NVL(AS_OF_DATE_IN, TRUNC(sysdate)-1);
BEGIN
 ... use V_AS_OF_DATE throughout
END;