Question

In a .NET Datatable, the columns are Object types, which can include a datatable as a valid type for a column. So you can create a fairly complex structure:

CompanyID (Integer) | CompanyName (String) | OrderRecords (DataTable) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1                   | Acme Corp.           | DataTable of Orders 

When calling an Oracle stored procedure, is there any way to return such a structure. I tried using the inline views, but it wouldn’t let me. Example:

refCursor IS ref CURSOR;  PROCEDURE GETCOMPANYLIST (   CompanyCursor OUT refCursor ) AS BEGIN Open CompanyCursor For SELECT COMPANYID, COMPANYNAME,      (SELECT * FROM ORDERS WHERE CompanyID = CompanyID) OrderRecords     WHERE IsActive = 'T'; END GETCOMPANYLIST; 

This doesn’t work, but is there any way to do what I am trying to do here? Currently, I have to get back the List of Companies in one call to the database, then loop through all the records and make individual calls to get each list of Orders.

[Added valid answer – until now there was no answer actually answering the question]

Answer 1

I needed to do something similar once, and ended up returning them all as OUT REF CURSOR’s, one for each result set. This could be loaded into a DataSet if preferred.