Call procedure that uses REF CURSOR?

Question

Can someone tell me how to call a procedure that uses a REF CURSOR?
Procedure is something like this:
PROCEDURE my_proc
P_PROG_ID IN VARCHAR2,
P_CRITERIA IN VARCHAR2,
P_TASKCURSOR OUT MYREFCUR
IS
blah, blah blah
I tried this to call the procedure:
exec my_proc(variable1,variable2,variable3)
but I don't know how to define variable3.
Can someone help me out?

Answer 1

Based on the parameters for the procedure, it looks like you have a cursor (myrefcursor) defined in a package somewhere. So, in sqlplus, you would need to do it in an anonymous block, something like:
DECLARE
   l_cur package_name,myrefcur;
   variables to hold cursor fields
BEGIN
   my_proc('ID', 'Criteria', l_cur);
   LOOP
      FETCH l_cur INTO variables to hold cursor fields
      EXIT WHEN l_cur%NOTFOUND;
      Do something with variables
   END LOOP;
   CLOSE l_cur;
END;If you are on Oracle 9 or higher, assuming that myrefcursor is weakly typed,
you could change the definition of the procedure to:
PROCEDURE my_proc (p_prog_id    IN  VARCHAR2,
                   p_criteria   IN  VARCHAR2,
                   P_TASKCURSOR OUT SYS_REFCURSOR)then you could call it in sql plus like:
-- Define the variables
var var1 VARCHAR2(100);
var var2 VARCHAR2(100);
var cur  SYS_REFCURSOR;
-- Assign Vlaues to the IN parameters
EXEC :var1 := 'ID'; :var2 := 'Criteria';
EXEC my_proc(:var1, :var2, :cur);
-- See the contents of the cursor
print curHTH
John