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Question

(forms 9iR2, 9i DBMS)
does anyone have any advice on if it is possible (and if so - how!) I can achive the following:
I would like to find out if there is a requirement for carrying out a commit in my form, ie when an item on a block has changed, or one or more blocks of PL/SQL have issued any DML statements (INSERT/DELETE/MERGE) and have not issued a commit.
The "block has changed" part is easy, using :system.form_status = 'CHANGED', but the dml statement is proving to be trickier - I thought that I could use sql%rowcount, but this does not appear to persist accross the forms scope, but just within the pl/sql block which the DML is originally issued in.
example:
procedure write_a_record is
begin
insert into test_table (test_col) values ('X');
message(sql%rowcount); --this would display 1, as expected
end;
procedure commit_if_needed is
begin
if (:system.form_status = 'CHANGED') or (sql%rowcount > 0) then
commit;
end if;
end;
however, when the second procedure is called, after the first one - sql%rowcount returns NULL!
any ideas?!
thanks,
pete :)

Answer 1

Peter,
SQL*ROWCOUNT is not what you want in any case.
You can:
delete from some_tab;
delete from some_tab where 1=2;
and what you will do with sql%rowcount?
As far as I remember there is something in the database that indicate whether were any changes since start of transaction, but it seems that this is more dba topic than Forms...
But why you need procedure commit_if_needed ?
Why not commit_always?
If nothing to commit it will nothing to do.