How to access PL/SQL data types through JDBC

Question

Hi,
We have stored procedures written in PL/SQL. These stored procs take both IN and OUT parameters. The parameter types are both regular datatypes like NUMBER, VARCHAR etc. So far so good. I know how to handle these data types.
Some of the stored procs also use parameters that are defined as composite data types like %ROWTYPE or %RECORD. How would I set the values of these data types? Can I use the oracle extension - support for Oracle Objects to accomplish this. If so please let me know with an example. If not any other suggestions or help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Karthik
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Answer 1

JDBC (and SQLJ) only support SQL types as stored procedure arguments, not PL/SQL types.
If your stored procedure uses a PL/SQL-only type, such as BOOLEAN, record types, or index-by tables, then you cannot call it from Java (or, for that matter, from other languages as well).
There is one exception: scalar index-by table arguments have been supported since JDBC 8.1.7 in the JDBC-OCI driver (refer to the JDBC manual for specifics).
One workaround is to create wrapper PL/SQL stored procedures that take SQL arguments and convert them to PL/SQL -and vice versa- and call the original PL/SQL stored procedures. For example, a record type could be exploded into individual arguments, or it could be converted into a SQL object type, index-by tables could be represented as SQL collection types, etc.
You can find a small example of this in the back of the JPublisher manual, where an example is given how to call a PL/SQL stored procedure that takes BOOLEAN arguments.