Problem converting XMLTYPE data into database rows.

Question

Can anyone help with this ?
I�ve got an XML document like the following:
<ROWSET><ROW>><NAME>John</NAME></ROW></ROWSET>
I want to extract the �Name� element and insert it into a table that has one column:
create table employee
(empname varchar2(50));
The following PL/SQL block does the job:
begin
insert into employee
(empname)
select extractvalue(value(xmltab),'/ROW/NAME')
from table(xmlsequence(extract(xmltype('
<ROWSET><ROW>><NAME>Cpty 1</NAME></ROW></ROWSET>')
,'/ROWSET/ROW'))) xmltab;
commit;
end;
However, instead of having the XML string embedded in the actual SQL statement I would like to assign the XML string to a variable (of type XMLTYPE) and refer to the variable in the SQL statement i.e.
declare
v_xml xmltype;
begin
v_xml := xmltype(�<ROWSET><ROW>><NAME>John</NAME></ROW></ROWSET>�)
insert into employee
(empname)
select extractvalue(value(xmltab),'/ROW/NAME')
from table(xmlsequence(extract(v_xml,'/ROWSET/ROW'))) xmltab;
commit;
end;
When I run this I get the following exception:
ORA-22905 Cannot access rows from a non-nested table.
I can�t understand why the first example works but the second example doesn�t. I want to get the second version working because eventually I want to put this code in a stored proc that excepts an xmltype parameter.
Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi
Now I understand why you want to use an insert as select...
The following PL/SQL code should work...
declare
v_xml xmltype;
begin
v_xml := xmltype('<ROWSET><ROW><NAME>John</NAME></ROW></ROWSET>');
insert into employee (empname)
select extractvalue(value(t),'/NAME')
from table(cast(xmlsequence(extract(v_xml, '/ROWSET/ROW/NAME'))as xmlsequencetype)) t;
commit;
end;
Chris