How to close open cursors in a forms app

Question

All,
I'm not a forms developer. I'm a database administrator so I'm asking this question from that perspective. I know nothing about forms development.
We have several forms applications that appear to hold many SELECT cursors open when they run. I've asked my forms developers about this and they are giving me the idea that they don't have much control over this. I have no idea myself so I'm asking here.
When one issues selects from a form, do those selects remain as open cursors while the form runs? Is it possible to close those select cursors from within the form so that the application does not keep so many cursors open simultaneously?
I am typically seeing a forms application with 70-100 open cursors. And we have hundreds of end users each running the forms application which is causing a lot of problems with the sheer number of open cursors.
I've already bumped the database OPEN_CURSORS parameter but it's my feeling that developers should be doing a better job of closing cursors from within the form.
Can anyone give me some guidance here or point me to some documents that describe how to reduce the number of open cursors to the database from a forms app?
Thanks,

Answer 1

There are several ways Forms use cursors. In the standard default method, users enter a query where condition and then execute the query. This process opens a cursor on the server, and the form fetches a few (20 or so) rows and displays on the screen (in a base-table "block"). If the user scrolls down, more rows are fetched from the cursor. This can go on and on if the user keeps scrolling down through the data. I am not sure when the cursor gets closed -- there is no Forms command to close this one. Only closing the form, or else re-executing the query process would close such a cursor.
In the PL/SQL code, where the developer has control, a cursor can be opened, rows fetched, and then closed. This can be done either with Open-Fetch-Close or in a For... Loop. The developer can explicitly close this cursor, or PL/SQL theoretically closes the cursor when the block of code is exited.
There is of course the SQL Select into, but that only works in PL/SQL for single-row selects. I doubt this is a major problem.
And finally, there are the record groups, where Forms runs the select to draw all the data into an array in the form. These should be closed automatically, I believe.
Now... if you can determine which tables the cursors are remaining open, maybe your developers can zero in on the forms, and maybe clean up some things. However, I am doubtful much can be done. It seems to me that if the open cursors are causing some database sluggishness, then maybe adding more memory on the server is the best option.