ORA-306500 error when using EXEC_SQL? [SOLVED]

Question

I used Francois Degrelle's example of doing a dynamic where clause to create a procedure using the EXEC_SQL package to get various counts from a table with different where clauses. Everything works for all the where clauses except when I try a date comparison I get the ORA-306500 error. The where clause I'm using takes 2 screen date fields:
'WHERE date_column BETWEEN ' || :date_field1 || ' AND ' || :date_field2
Anybody know what is causing this error?

Answer 1

you forgot the to_date in the dynamic part.
what you pass to sql engine now is
where date_column between 10-FEB-2008 and 11-FEB-2008
don't think this would work...
what you need is:
where date_column between to_date('10-FEB-2008', 'DD-MON-RRRR') and .....
so you have to do some type conversions:
first of all convert in your form your date variable to a string with known format:
=> to_char(:date_field, 'DD-MON-RRRR')
now you have a string which looks like this:
'10-FEB-2008'
then let's go over to the dynamic part:
you want to restrict your where clause on date values, so when restricting with specific strings (the string from above), you have to convert it to a date datatype with to date.
so, this would look like this (as mentioned in my last post):
'.....between to_date(''''||to_char(:date_field1, 'dd-mon-rrrr')||''', ''dd-mon-rrrr'') and ..... '
best thing would be to display your query, and pass it in sqlplus as long it won't work ;-).
regards