Stored Proc to create XML (using nested cursors)?

Question

From previous posts and from the
documentation for XSQL I have
discovered the joys of the
CURSOR operator to create
nested tables: i.e:
SELECT dname,
CURSOR (SELECT ename, sale....) as employees
FROM dept
However, I can not find any other
documentation on how to program (PL/SQL)
this functionality.
I would like to use XSQL as
it is exactly what I need, but
I can not because my client does
not want to use Java and they
require IIS, but do not want to
use JRUN, etc... (I tried this
first).
Since I only need to do an XML
dump to a variable for processing
by other parts of the program, life
is fairly easy. I have already done
this using Microsoft Data Shapes in
VB (client does not want VC++ either...)
However this was slow.
In order to speed things up I want to
create a stored procedure in Oracle to
dump out the XML hierarchy to a variable given
an SQLQuery input. If I use
nested CURSORS this should be very easy.
I would like to create a recursive PL/SQL
function to handle this, but I have the
following questions:
1) I want the function to have an
input of an open cursor,
My plan is to detect the column
type, when it is a nested cursor
I would recurse with the open cursor
to handle the nested cursor.
2) I can not find a reference on to
programatically handle "untyped collections
based on an SQL statement" in anything
other than the XSQL documentation.
I am assuming that I can detect the
column type of nested cursor somehow
and then recurse on this to handle
dump the recordset to an XML tagset.
But I wuold like to find some documentation
or examples on the calls, type statements,
etc....

Answer 1

I think the CURSOR() thing is an invention of the XSQL Servlet; not available elsewhere.
You can accomplish nesting via user defined types and object views, using the "cast(multiset())" syntax, which is not documented particularly well either. This does require some setup, and so is not particularly dynamic.