Create a cursor or collection from a table that is unknown at designtime

Question

Hi All,
I have a bit of a problem: I have to loop through a table (by means of a cursor, collection, refcursor - does not matter - any way that is possible is fine), but I do not know which table at design/compiletime. PLSQL does not want to let me use %rowtype unless the table already exists at compiletime, but I need to write a generic function to migrate data from one datamodel to another (two different applications).
In other words:
type Tc_OOMTable is ref cursor;
c_OOMTable Tc_OOMTable;
rec_OOMTable c_OOMTable%rowtype;
sqltext varchar(1024);
BEGIN
initialize(OOMTab, G3ETab);
sqltext := 'select * from ' || OOMTable;
--loop through all elements in OOMTable
open c_OOMTable for sqltext;
loop
fetch c_OOMTable into rec_OOMTable;
exit when c_OOMTable%notfound;
I would like to be able to pass a tablename to the OOMTable variable. Is that possible at all? If so, how can I do that?
If this is not possible: could I use the ROWNUM and loop through a table like this:
FOR j IN 1..NumRows
LOOP
select * from <my table name> where rownum=j;
--process the row here...
END LOOP;
TIA,
Stefan

Answer 1

Dave,
There are a couple of things: I know the applications that both datasets are coming from/going to, so I know a number of columns that the apps add to the table. I do not know what the user has added for his/her own reasons.
Secondly, I use user_tab_columns to compare the columns between the two tables, including data type, data length/scale/precision if applicable, and store the matching columns in a varray of records.
If I don't write a generic function I'll have to write code for every table, which is what I'm trying to prevent. I'll have a look at DBMS_SQL, see if that does for me what I want.
Thanks,
Stefan