Using select cursor(select...) from ...

Question

I am trying to use the following construction in the report region:
select
cursor(select * from employees) as "EMPs",
cursor(select * from departments) as "DEPTs"
from dual
It is failing with the following error:
report error:
ORA-00932: inconsistent datatypes: expected NUMBER got CURSER
Just wondering if I just cannot use such a construction, or it's a bug....

Answer 1

OK,
My real query is much more complex then the one I specified above. I was just interested in using that specific syntaxis, as I use it a lot in my XSQL pages, and it works perfectly.
For a sake of an argument, lets say I want to see all the departments' attributes, alltogether with a list of all employees working for that specific department. Of course, I could have used an outer join to achieve this, but I want to use the following:
SELECT d.department_id,
       d.department_name,
       d.location_id,
       CURSOR(SELECT e.first_name,
                     e.last_name
              FROM   employees e
              WHERE  e.department_id = d.department_id
       ) emps
FROM   depatments dWhen I use similar syntaxis in my XSQL pages, it returns a pretty xml document like the following:
<ROW_SET>
  <ROW id="1">
    <department_id>1</department_id>
    <department_name>Accounting</department_name>
    <location_id>12</location_id>
    <ROW_SET_EMPS>
      <ROW id="1">
        <first_name>John</first_name>
        <last_name>Smith</last_name>
      </ROW>
      <ROW id="2">
        <first_name>Smith</first_name>
        <last_name>Johnson</last_name>
      </ROW>
    </ROW_SET_EMPS>
  </ROW>
</ROW_SET>Then I just apply an XSLT over the returned XML, and I get a pretty HTML page displayed in the browser window...
I am specifically interested in this syntaxis, because I have A LOT of XSQL pages published to my intranet users, and I would like to just take those queries and publish them as reports in HTMLDB, since HTMLDB provides me with the session management, authentication, etc., etc., capabilities.
Thank you for all your replies.