Oracle Reports 6i and the Dynamic SQL

Question

I use Oracle 8.1.7 and Oracle Reports 6i Builder;
My problem is that I am trying to obtain dataset for the report via stored procedure (using ref cursor). As far as I understand I must specify strongly typed refcursor in my package (specify record type based of which the ref cursor will be created, not just ref cursor without any return specification). But when it comes to my stored procedure implementation, here I would like to use dynamically created SELECT statement and since it will be parsed and executed at runtime I forced to use only untyped ref cursor to return data from the stored procedure.
TYPE my_refcur IS REF CURSOR;
cv_tmp my_refcur;
v_SQL VARCHAR2(2000);
BEGIN
-- here I set v_SQL ....
OPEN cv_tmp
FOR v_SQL;
RETURN cv_tmp;
END;
But this way I somehow need to convert untyped ref cursor to strongly typed one. This is a problem I would like you to help me with.
Thanks in advise.
By the way, I am not familiar with Oracle Reports 9. Does it still require to return only strongly typed ref cursor from stored procedures?

Answer 1

Hello Alexey,
The reason Reports requires strongly typed ref cursors to be returned to it is that, with weak ref cursors the list of columns returned by the cursor cannot be determined at report design time. For a weak ref cursor, the data will be populated based on a query specified only at runtime. As a result, you will not be able to add any layout to your report, since the query group will be empty.
Please take a look at the reply in the post below on the same topic, for a method to retrieve data from a stored procedure returning a weakly typed ref cursor:
Re: Reports On Ref Cursor
Thanks,
Srivas.
The Oracle Reports Team.