How to return rows from a declare/begin/end block in Oracle?

Question

I want to return rows from a select statement within a declare/begin/end block. I can do this in T-SQL but I would like to know how to do it in PL/SQL.

The code loo

Answer 1

Well, this depends heavily on your data access library.

You can return any SQL-compatible type as a parameter. This includes complex SQL types and collection types. But most libraries are simply not capable of handling Oracle's object types.

Either way, my examples will use these object types:

create type SomeType as object(Field1 VarChar(50));

create type SomeTypeList as table of SomeType;

When your access library can handle object types, you could simply return a list of PL/SQL objects:

begin
  :list := SomeTypeList(SomeType('a'),SomeType('b'),SomeType('c'));
end;

If not, you could hack around it by forcing this list into a select and return its result as a cursor:

declare
  list SomeTypeList;
begin
  list := SomeTypeList(SomeType('a'),SomeType('b'),SomeType('c'));
  open :yourCursor for
    SELECT A
    FROM   table(list);
end;