PLSQL portlet - problem calling stored procedure -

Question

Good day folks. My portal version 10.1.2. I have a dynamic page with multiple rows. For simplicity, example here has two columns => id and value. The initial dilemma - The stored procedure specified in the action attribute of the <form> tag has to have parameters that match in name and count to the fields on the html form. But, the number of rows is variable on the form. I currently use pl/sql to generate the page. I have two forms in the html - form A has two static fields id and value, with an action attribute of the stored procedure I want to run. The second html form is form B. It has id_1, value_1, id_2, value_2, id_3, value_3 and so on with a variable number of rows. SO, when the user clicks the "Submit" button at the bnottom of the page, I call a javascript passing in the number of rows. I then loop through the Form B, and for each row of data, I do a submit of Form A. My goal is to run the stored procedure in the database for each row of data in Form B. I use Form A to accomodate the requirement that the stored procedure has to match in name and number the parameters inthe form.
This is to avoid an update button on each row of data, also.
The problem - in my javascript, I set the values of Form A to the values from Form B correctly. However, only the last rowis successful in running the procedure. For example, if I have 3 rows in Form B, I want to submit form A 3 times, but, it only seems to submit once for row #3. The weird thing is if I put an alert message after the document.formA.submit(); command, the stored procedure is successfully called for each row in form B, but when I remove the alert, only the last row successfully calls the procedure!
Thanks in advance if anybody has any ideas -
Kent

Answer 1

Let's continue the example of 3 rows.
It sounds like that you submit the form 3 times in quick succession, and so before the Action for Form A has had time to run and respond for the first row, the second row has been submitted, and therefore the web page will stop trying to display the results from the submit of Row 1 (by this I mean it'll stop the http request, if you do this quick enough then the back-end function won't run). Then the same thing happens to Row 2's submit when Row 3 starts.
What it sounds like you need to do is to use only 2 parameters, but repeat them on the HTML page, when the submit is run it's passed to oracle as a type 'owa_util.vc_arr'. There is a more comprehensive solution to this problem in another thread:
passing variable number of arguments in a stored procedure
Please note though that you have to be careful of the situations where your form only has one row to submit to the oracle function, in this case the data type of the parameter will be a VARCHAR2 rather than a owa_util.vc_arr. The solution to this problem is to always have a an extra dummy parameter which is empty and you skip over it during your processing. (Thought I'd better include this information in case you ran into this problem).
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Ron.