Exiting a loop

Question

Im struggling to think of the most appropriate exit criteria. I want the cursor to exit once all the records matching the criteria in the cursor have been extracted, yet for some reason it runs four times and I don't want it to.
Thanks

Answer 1

The easiest way is to use a CURSOR FOR loop which will take care of all that stuff for you. You can do this in several ways, but the most common are:
DECLARE
CURSOR my_cur IS
SELECT *
FROM emp
WHERE dept_no = 10;
BEGIN
   FOR my_rec IN my_cur LOOP
      IF my_rec.column_name = some_value THEN
         do_something
      ELSE
         do_something_else
      END IF;
   END LOOP;
END;
or, even easier
BEGIN
   FOR my_rec IN (SELECT *
                  FROM emp
                  WHERE dept_no = 10) LOOP
      IF my_rec.column_name = some_value THEN
         do_something
      ELSE
         do_something_else
      END IF;
   END LOOP;
END;If you absolutely need to use a DECLARE OPEN FETCH CLOSE structure for some reason then the corerct structure is something like:
DECLARE
CURSOR my_cur IS
SELECT *
FROM emp
WHERE dept_no = 10;
v1 my_cur.col1%TYPE;
v2 my_cur.col2%TYPE;
v3 my_cur.col3%TYPE;
BEGIN
   OPEN my_cur;
   LOOP
      FETCH my_cur INTO v1, v2, v3;
      EXIT WHEN my_cur%NOT_FOUND;
      IF my_rec.column_name = some_value THEN
         do_something
      ELSE
         do_something_else
      END IF;
   END LOOP;
   CLOSE my_cur;
END;TTFN
John