I need my program to fail when it encounters a letter in the employee no..

Question

to whom..
I have this cursor below. I need it to FAIL (as in stop the program its part of) when it encounters an employee number that contains a letter in it. I thought by putting the line ..NOT REGEXP_LIKE(per.employee_number, '[[:alpha:]]').. it might work but of course it just doesn't include those ones in the selection. How can I do this?
   CURSOR c_check_employee (p_emp_number VARCHAR2, p_ni_number VARCHAR2)
   IS
      SELECT DISTINCT per.person_id, per.business_group_id, per.last_name,
                      per.start_date, per.date_of_birth, per.email_address,
                     LPAD (per.employee_number, 8, '0') employee_number,
                      per.first_name,
                      per.marital_status, per.middle_names, per.nationality,
                      per.national_identifier, per.sex, per.title,
                      padd.address_id, padd.primary_flag, padd.address_line1,
                      padd.address_line2, padd.address_line3,
                      padd.town_or_city, padd.postal_code,
                      padd.telephone_number_1, paas.assignment_id,
                      paas.assignment_number, paas.object_version_number,
                      paas.effective_start_date, paas.effective_end_date,
                      paas.job_id, paas.position_id, paas.location_id,
                      paas.organization_id, paas.assignment_type,
                      paas.supervisor_id, paas.default_code_comb_id,
                      paas.set_of_books_id, paas.period_of_service_id
                 FROM per_all_people_f per,
                      per_all_assignments_f paas,
                      per_addresses padd
                WHERE padd.person_id(+) = per.person_id
                  AND paas.person_id(+) = per.person_id
                 AND per.national_identifier = p_ni_number
    --       and NOT REGEXP_LIKE(per.employee_number, '[[:alpha:]]')
          and TRIM (LEADING '0' FROM per.employee_number) = TRIM (LEADING '0' FROM p_emp_number);Many thanks..
Steven

Answer 1

JackyWhite wrote:Sven W. wrote:
You could put a check constraint onto the column. This would prevent wrong values to be entered. Could I? By changing the select statement to add the line..
REGEXP_INSTR(employee_number, '[[:alpha:]]')>0
.. it will only select numbers and stop the program when a letter in the employee number is encountered? I'll give it a test now!
thanks again..If you add this as a restriction to your where clause then you won't get any errors. Those problem records will just be removed from the select.
However my suggestion had beend slightly different. You can create a check constraint on your table. This check constraint will give an error whenever somebody enters (insert or update) employee_number that have an alpha inside. I'm not sure you you can solve your current problem with that, but it might be the better long term solution. It also requires you to cleanup your data first, e.g. remove or change the "broken" employee-numbers.