Need to call a recursive SP from Java code

Question

I have a table with parent child relationships as:
CREATE TABLE parent_child
parentid NUMBER,
childid NUMBER
Each child can have more than one parents. Now for a given child i need to find all the parents. My solution is a stored procedure as follows:
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE Sp_Getparents(child_id IN NUMBER)
IS
     CURSOR parents IS
SELECT parentid FROM PARENT_CHILD WHERE PARENT_CHILD.childid = child_id;
BEGIN
FOR parents_cur IN parents LOOP
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(parents_cur.parentid);
     Sp_Getparents(parents_cur.parentid);
END LOOP;
END Sp_Getparents;
This prints the non-distinct values fo all parents to a value.
Now my problem starts when i wish to access the result of this SP from my java code.
For that i have no idea if a DBMS_OUTPUT will give me a resultset or not. If not, then what is the way to do so. I tried creating a REF CURSOR for the same, but was not able to test the result out on sqlplus.
Can anyone help me on this?
Thanks in advance
Pankaj

Answer 1

You need to return a refcursor like this (9i and up)
CREATE OR REPLACE
FUNCTION sp_getparents(child_id IN NUMBER) RETURN SYS_REFCURSOR
IS
  c SYS_REFCURSOR;
BEGIN
  OPEN c FOR
    SELECT parentid
    FROM parent_child
    WHERE parent_child.childid = child_id;
  RETURN c;
END sp_get_parents;
show errorsif you want to test this in SQL*Plus:
var c refcursor;
exec :c := sp_getparents(3);
print c;hope this helps
chet