Question

I have an Oracle stored procedure which takes two parameters: a custom data type and a string.

Calling the stored procedure in Oracle, I would do the following:

EXECUTE MY_STORED_PROCEDURE(MYTYPE_T(99, 231), 'mystring')

How can I execute this using C#? I understand that I need to setup the command to be a stored procedure, but how do I specify the first parameter as custom data type?

Update:

MYTYPE_T is TABLE OF NUMBER created via

CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE mytype_t AS TABLE OF NUMBER ; 

Answer 1

You won’t be able to do this easily with the deprecated System.Data.OracleClient
but you can utilize oracle’s ODP with using UDTs. If that is not an option, I am unsure how you can do it via parameters in C# with System.Data.

ODP does come with a lot of examples and there are examples in the above links.

I am going to add some more links that will hopefully help:

1. visual studio ODP index
2. this shows you exactly how to
   utilize the ODT to create you custom
   class wrappers and call them (do
   note that this is midway through,
   they walk through using the tool to
   create the custom types above it in
   the example — this walkthrough is
   quite thorough and should get you
   directly where you need to be)
3. Download: now this guy also
   installs sample files, this is
   another terrific example of exactly
   what you need to do: once installed
   goto [directory path you
   install]..\product\11.2.0\client_1\odp.net\samples\4\UDT\object1.cs

It really pays to allow the ODT tools for Visual studio to create your classes for your UDTs for you (e.g. IOracleCustomType and such) . you can then go into them and amend them to suit your needs. then once all is said and done (snippet from object1.cs):

    Person p1   = new Person();
p1.Name     = "John";
p1.Address  = "Address1";
p1.Age = 20;

// Establish a connection to Oracle
OracleConnection con = new OracleConnection(constr);
con.Open();

// Update Person object and insert it into a database table
OracleCommand cmd = new OracleCommand(sql1, con);
cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;
OracleParameter param1 = new OracleParameter();

param1.OracleDbType   = OracleDbType.Object;
param1.Direction      = ParameterDirection.InputOutput;

// Note: The UdtTypeName is case-senstive
param1.UdtTypeName     = "SCOTT.ODP_OBJ1_SAMPLE_PERSON_TYPE";   
param1.Value           = p1;

cmd.Parameters.Add(param1);

also note that Person class must implement IOracleCustomType (which can be created by following the link in #2)

/* Person Class
   An instance of a Person class represents an ODP_OBJ1_SAMPLE_PERSON_TYPE object
   A custom type must implement INullable and IOracleCustomType interfaces
*/
public class Person : INullable, IOracleCustomType

The above is for a full custom type, but you are after an associative array ODP binding:

http://weblogs.asp.net/ricardoperes/archive/2009/05/14/odp-net-associative-arrays.aspx

you’ll want to use

param1.CollectionType = OracleCollectionType.PLSQLAssociativeArray;

and everything should fall into place