Passing empty Associative Array

Question

I have a sProc that takes a number and then an optional plsql table of numbers.
I cannot figure out how to pass the empty array to Oracle. I set the param size to 0 and try to set the value to null but it throws an exception if it is null or system.dbnull.
I tried the suggestion of passing an array of size one but it passes 0 to my sproc. My sproc is doing an PLSQLTable.Count check to process the list so it needs to have count = 0;
Any ideas?
thx
jack
BTW - There is a similar thread here: Passing empty Associative Array

Answer 1

We are having the same problem, but the suggested work-around mentioned above will not work for us. In our case, our stored procedure has multiple TABLE parameters that it expects to have the same length.
For example, a stored procedure that is used to insert multiple records in to an "Addresses" table. Each parameter in the stored procedure represents a single element in the address (line1, line2, line3, city, state, zip code). Here's a rough facsimile of what we're working with:
TYPE tElement IS TABLE OF VARCHAR2(50) INDEX BY BINARY_INTEGER;
PROCEDURE insAddresses ( pLine1 tElement,
               pLine2     tElement,
               pLine3     tElement,
               pCity     tElement,
               pState     tElement,
               pZipCode tElement )
IS
BEGIN
FOR i IN pLine1.FIRST..pLine1.LAST
LOOP
INSERT INTO addresses
(line1, line2, line3,
city, state, zipcode)
VALUES
(pLine1(i), pLine2(i), pLine3(i),
pCity(i), pState(i), ZipCode(i));
END LOOP;
END insAddresses
In this case, each array passed into the procedure must have the same length. Unfortunately, not all addresses have values for Line2 or Line3, so more often than not, those arrays are empty. Even though they had been declared with the same length as the Line1 array, the values are all null. When Oracle tries to read from those empty arrays, it throws the following error, "ORA-01403: no data found".
This is how we are passing the parameter to Oracle from C#:
public void AddInputParameter( string pName, string[] pValue)
OracleParameter param = mCom.Parameters.Add(pName,OracleDbType.Varchar2);
     param.Direction = ParameterDirection.Input;
     param.CollectionType = OracleCollectionType.PLSQLAssociativeArray;
     param.Value = pValue;     
     param.Size = pValue.Length;