Question

I just discovered Oracle’s ANYDATA and ANYTYPE and thought it would be useful to generic-ify some very repetitive code I have. I tried a very simple code sample that looks like this:

declare
    --simple test query
    cursor myCurs is
        select sysdate from dual;

    type t_arr is table of myCurs%rowtype;
    v_arr t_arr;

    v_anydata ANYDATA;    
begin

    open myCurs;
    fetch myCurs bulk collect into v_arr;
    close myCurs;

    dbms_output.put_line(v_arr.count || ' records');

    v_anydata := ANYDATA.convertCollection(v_arr);
    dbms_output.put_line(anydata.gettypename(v_anydata));

end;
/

Running this code gives me the error “ORA-22370: incorrect usage of method ORA-22370 incorrect ussage of method ConvertCollection” (Yes, it actually repeats ORA-22370).

My question is: Is it possible to use ANYDATA on collections of rowtypes? I ask this because all examples I’ve seen of ANYDATA (so far) with collections use object types, none use rowtypes, but I haven’t seen anything (yet) that explicitly says that rowtypes can’t be used.

My goal was to clean up some very repetitive bulk-collect/insert code that does the same thing over and over, but with different cursors for different tables.

(Oracle 10g)

Answer 1

ANYDATA works with SQL data_types, i.e. anything you could use to define a table column.

%ROWTYPE is a PL/SQL construct, and so is not recognised by the SQL engine. If you think about the dynamic nature of %ROWTYPE you’ll be able to figure out why.

---

Wanting to clean up repetitive code is a noble idea. I have previously implemented an ETL processor in SQL Types which used a supertype Object to own the generic processing, and subtypes to execute table specific code (such as inserts). These subtypes are completely generatable: not as slick as a dynamic %ROWTYPE implementation would have been, but still easy enough.