Hello

What kind of information is possible to get from a cursor or a rowtype
in oracle pl/sql. I want to display information about a object on a
webpage, al information, in one column. The information is stored in
one row in one table.

I could of course reference all column names and display the
information from one at the time but this gives some disadvantages.
First of all, if a column is removed from the table in the future, the
program will crash.
Second, if a column is added it will not be displayed and no notice
given. So a good thing would be if I could loop trough the table
sideways in some way or if I at least could get information about how
many columns exist (it is not likely that one column will be removed
but perhaps one will be added).

I don't think this is possible in oracle any information (or pointer
to a good webpage) about what info I can get out of a cursor or row
would be appreciated.

Thanks a lot

Tim

tim.gahnstroem@cern.ch (Tim Gahnstroem) wrote in message news:<c2fd55f1.0308140003.560efef9@posting.google. com>...
> Hello
>
> What kind of information is possible to get from a cursor or a rowtype
> in oracle pl/sql. I want to display information about a object on a
> webpage, al information, in one column. The information is stored in
> one row in one table.
>
> I could of course reference all column names and display the
> information from one at the time but this gives some disadvantages.
> First of all, if a column is removed from the table in the future, the
> program will crash.
> Second, if a column is added it will not be displayed and no notice
> given. So a good thing would be if I could loop trough the table
> sideways in some way or if I at least could get information about how
> many columns exist (it is not likely that one column will be removed
> but perhaps one will be added).
>
> I don't think this is possible in oracle any information (or pointer
> to a good webpage) about what info I can get out of a cursor or row
> would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks a lot
>
> Tim

Tim, It could just be my reading of your post, but I found it to be
confusing and I am not really sure what you want to do.

Information about objects created within the database exist in the
rdbms dictionary tables. In this case all_tab_columns would provide a
list of the existing columns at the time of the inquery. Using plsql
it would be very easy to concatenate each column name into a single
varchar variable since the maximum number of columns in a table times
the maximum column length of 30 is less than 32k.

There have been numerous posts on this forum on converting rows into
columns that you could also search on. Look for the term: pivot
table. The asktom site also has information on this task.

HTH -- Mark D Powell --