Question

In my stored procedure I have the following statement

IF (sdate > sysdate)
            THEN
                RAISE exec_not_allowed;
                                returnval := sdate;

            END IF;

returnval is IN OUT parameter in my procedure.

In java normally an OUT parameter is fetched by using:

callablestatement.getInt(2);

How can I receive returnval in Java if an exception is raised? The exception error code is captured in the Java SQLException part.

Answer 1

Why are you raising an exception at all in this situation? You should only really raise an exception in two situations:

1. You intend to catch the exception and deal with it appropriately in the calling code.
2. Something is wrong and you want your application to crash and burn.

You’re not doing either of these things, and don’t need to. You just want to stop the code running and “return” (it’s a procedure) your value. In this case I would suggest using return.

return ends the execution of the anonymous block that contains it and, in a procedure, returns “control” to the calling statement. i.e. it fits the bill perfectly.

The following code assigns sdate to your out parameter before halting the execution of the procedure, using return. “More stuff” will never occur.

create or replace procedure my_procedure_one (returnval in out date) is
begin

   -- some stuff.
   if sdate > sysdate then
      returnval := sdate;
      -- we don-t want to continue any more if this is true.
      return;
   end if;
   -- more stuff.
end;

If you only want to assign sdate to returnval if the condition is not true then you simply swap round these two lines; maybe taking it out of the if statement to make it more obvious. This is what your code does at the moment as when you raise exec_not_allowed all execution is stopped.

create or replace procedure my_procedure_two (returnval in out date) is
begin

   -- some stuff.

   -- we don-t want to continue any more if this is true.
   if sdate > sysdate then
      return;
   end if;

   returnval := sdate;
   -- more stuff.
end;

In either case your Java call remains the same. In the first procedure (my_procedure_one) you’ll get sdate returned and in the second a null, assuming that returnval hadn’t been previously assigned.