Question

I’ve been searching the documentation and google but I can’t seem to find what I am looking for; my version of oracle is 10.2.0.5.

Let’s use this simple query:

select dbms_xmlgen.getxml('select cursor(select ''1'' "one", ''2''
"two", ''3'' "three" from dual) "numbers" from dual') from dual;

the result is:

"<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ROWSET>
 <ROW>
  <numbers>
   <numbers_ROW>
    <one>1</one>
    <two>2</two>
    <three>3</three>
   </numbers_ROW>
  </numbers>
 </ROW>
</ROWSET>
"

Question1: Why was “numbers_row” created when “numbers” is sufficient (at least for my purposes)?

Question2: Can I get rid of that extra nesting with the xmlgen package or some other package? I’m using regular expressions to do so but it seems a bit unreasonable.

Thank you,
-joel

Answer 1

You need to read through this article:
http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/DBMS_XMLGEN

It explains how to change the Oracle default names generated by the DBMS_XMLGEN package.

The answer to your Question 1 is: it’s the default values and behaviour for the Oracle DBMS_XMLGEN package

For Question 2: You would need to call some additional DBMS_XMLGEN procedures to alter the default values so you would need to use PL/SQL:

DECLARE
   ctx DBMS_XMLGEN.ctxHandle;
   xml CLOB;
BEGIN
   ctx := dbms_xmlgen.newcontext('select ''1'' "one", ''2'' "two", ''3'' "three" from dual');
   dbms_xmlgen.setRowTag(ctx, 'NUMBERS');
   xml := dbms_xmlgen.getxml(ctx);
   dbms_output.put_line(substr(xml,1,255));
END;

Would output:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ROWSET>
 <NUMBERS>
  <one>1</one>
  <two>2</two>
  <three>3</three>
 </NUMBERS>
</ROWSET>

There are procedures to replace the <ROWSET> value with something more meaningful too.

Hope it helps…