How to make a search in a form

Question

Hi
I have a form with a lot of items(name date,age,height) that i can use to make a search . I found many problems for the search , infact i had to create many cursors, one for each case. For example i would search for age and height or just from date and so on.
How can i make it more easy?
Can i use a dinamically query for a cursor ?
PLZ HELP

Answer 1

if you don't use oracle default search buttons, then you may code your own search buttons, inside, you may ,
e.g., user might want to enter height and age fields(Assume the table columns are HEIGHT and AGE),
then use,
IF :heightitem is not null then
w_str := ' AND HEIGHT ='||:heightitem;
END IF;
IF :AGEITEM IS NOT NULL THEN
w_str := w_str||' AND AGE='||:ageitem;
END IF;
then you set_block_property('..',default_where,w_str); then execute_query. In order to avoid giving user blank form fields when no records found, which oracle did this badly, then you may use SELECT COUNT(*) into cnt FROM ... WHERE ...w_str to detect the cnt, if cnt > 0 then execute_query, if not, then shoot no record data found message out.