Question

To whom it may respond to ,

I am trying to return list of dates and weekdays to be used in other functions. Code below is compiled without error. But it should give output of 15 days (via V_MAX_DAYS variable) and number of the day in that week.

I have tried to implement like this, but cannot get output using DBMS_OUTPUT. I want to test it but got ORA-06532 error at when running .
My aim is to return values to asp.net application as we have done using SYS_REFCURSOR.
How can I achieve that?
Thank you for your concern,

The script is as below :

CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE DATE_ROW AS OBJECT
(
  WEEKDAY_VALUE DATE,
  DATE_IN_LIST VARCHAR2(5)
)
/

CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE DATE_TABLE as table of DATE_ROW
/



CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION FN_LISTDATES
   RETURN DATE_TABLE
IS
   V_DATE_TABLE        DATE_TABLE    := DATE_TABLE ();
   V_MAX_DAYS          NUMBER        := 15;
   V_CALCULATED_DATE   DATE;
   V_WEEKDAY           VARCHAR2 (5);
BEGIN
   FOR X IN -2 .. V_MAX_DAYS
   LOOP
      SELECT TO_DATE (TO_CHAR (SYSDATE + X, 'DD.MM.YYYY'))
        INTO V_CALCULATED_DATE
        FROM DUAL;
      V_DATE_TABLE.EXTEND;
      V_DATE_TABLE(X) := DATE_ROW(V_CALCULATED_DATE, 'Test');
   END LOOP;
   RETURN V_DATE_TABLE;
END;
/

Answer 1

A few points.

1. If you want a DATE (V_CALCULATED_DATE) that is X days from SYSDATE with the time component set to midnight, which appears to be your intent here, you would want something like v_calculated_date := TRUNC(sysdate) + x;. A TO_DATE without an explicit format mask is going to create issues if a future session’s NLS_DATE_FORMAT happens not to be DD.MM.YYYY
2. If you really want to return a collection like this, your collection indexes would need to start with 1, not -2. You could accomplish that by doing v_date_table(x+3) := DATE_ROW(v_calculated_date, 'Test');.
3. However, I would tend to suspect that you would be better served here with a pipelined table function.

The pipelined table function would look something like

SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf

  1  CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION FN_LISTDATES
  2     RETURN DATE_TABLE
  3     PIPELINED
  4  IS
  5     V_MAX_DAYS          NUMBER        := 15;
  6     V_CALCULATED_DATE   DATE;
  7     V_WEEKDAY           VARCHAR2 (5);
  8  BEGIN
  9     FOR X IN -2 .. V_MAX_DAYS
 10     LOOP
 11        v_calculated_date := trunc(sysdate) + x;
 12        PIPE ROW( DATE_ROW(v_calculated_date,'Test') );
 13     END LOOP;
 14     RETURN;
 15* END;
SQL> /

Function created.

SQL> select * from table( fn_listDates );

WEEKDAY_V DATE_
--------- -----
30-NOV-10 Test
01-DEC-10 Test
02-DEC-10 Test
03-DEC-10 Test
04-DEC-10 Test
05-DEC-10 Test
06-DEC-10 Test
07-DEC-10 Test
08-DEC-10 Test
09-DEC-10 Test
10-DEC-10 Test

WEEKDAY_V DATE_
--------- -----
11-DEC-10 Test
12-DEC-10 Test
13-DEC-10 Test
14-DEC-10 Test
15-DEC-10 Test
16-DEC-10 Test
17-DEC-10 Test

18 rows selected.