Array or Table of Records or...what is best for my scenario?

Question

I have been given task to trap last 5 action taken on a form application by user. This would be used where user gets a FRM or ORA error, dump last 5 steps to a table in the database along with error. Trapping FRM or ORA error is easy; I am wondering what & how should I note last 5 steps ( like, what page, what block & what form the user was clicking/entering data etc) when error occurred. I am planning to use when-mouse-click or some other triggers to capture the data; but at every action if I try inserting one record & deleting one record from the database table ( last one knocked out), there is going to be a lot of I/O & that table is going to be too hot. I am trying to avoid that unwanted I/O & keep those 5 steps info somewhere in forms till user gets a error. And, when he/she gets error, he/she can dump those 5 steps info along with error messages/number in a error table.
My question is: what do I use? Array or Table of records..or something else. I have never used any of these & thought to discuss this before going deep into implementation.
Any suggestion would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Answer 1

You could use a table of records or a record group. They both achieve similar results but with very different syntax. I am not sure if there is any difference in performance.
Record groups are good for certain things like lists populated from the database because built-ins are provided for manipulating them. If you are going to do the manipulation programatically, I personally find the syntax for tables of records less cumbersome than record groups. Learning the syntax for tables of records is also likely to be more universally useful to you as they have various uses such as passing data between procedures.
In your situation the table of records needs to exist throughout the forms session rather than just during the execution of a single pl/sql block. The way to do that is create a program unit which is a package header without a body. Declare the table in there and it can be used throughout the form.
However, if you only ever want to keep 5 records, it would probably be easier just to have 5 ordinary items in a control block on the null canvas (or global variables). When you want to record your new action just do:
:item5 := :item4;
:item4 := :item3;
:item3 := :item2;
:item2 := :item1;
:item1 := :new_stuff;
You could even construct the above in a loop using
copy(name_in('item'||i),'item'i+i)
but with only 5 items to manipulate, is it worth the bother ?
Whatever method you decide to use, you are not going to get anything simpler than 5 little assignment statements.