Our customer said there were too many problems with our system. And development was not resolving problems fast enough. The customer shared their concerns with management. Management put the heat on team leads. Now my team lead wants more and more bugs fixed faster. I had to push back and say problems will be resolved when they get resolved. However I did attempt to be diligent in problem resolution. There was one last problem to resolve. The fix sounded simple when I determined the cause. But I was encountering some strange Pro*C behavior. Here is the code I was trying to use:void getType(char *pszType)
{
EXEC SQL BEGIN DECLARE SECTION;
char *pszLocalType = pszType;
END SQL BEGIN DECLARE SECTION;
EXEC SQL
SELECT type
INTO :pszLocalType
FROM myTable;
}
No matter how many times I ran the code, I always ended up with an empty string. However I got an actual value when I ran the SQL manually from SQL*Plus. What gives? Can you spot the problem? It took a while for me to realize what I was doing wrong. The variable into which I was trying to retrieve the data was defined as a pointer to the memory passed into the function. I really needed to have some space defined within the DECLARE section to store the SQL results. Then I could copy the value to the calling function. Here is a slightly updated result that worked:
void getType(char *pszType)
{
EXEC SQL BEGIN DECLARE SECTION;
char szLocalType[10+1];
END SQL BEGIN DECLARE SECTION;
EXEC SQL
SELECT type
INTO :szLocalType
FROM myTable;
Strcpy(pszType,szLocalType);
}
