That is a good point - and one you have shared with me offline.

Ultimately, when you are confronted with constraints, you have to manage around those constraints as best as you can. And based on what you have said here now and in the past, you have done yeoman's work in that regard.


>>I hear you...All I am saying is that it is not my preference to do things that would lock me into the fox box. But in your case, you have to make the call.
>
>If you only knew what we were locked in to here. < bg > IIS - not allowed. ASP -- not allowed. Cold Fusion server - allowed but no funds to get one. Notes Domino server - we got and are allowed to make Notes docs publishable to our intranet. Whooohooo!
>
>We also can use [and I have used] Oracle's htp functions and Database Access Descriptors for intranet apps. I just love writing hundreds of lines of proc code to produce a single web page. A slight exageration, but not very far off.
>
>>IMO, Oracle procs - using the utl_file package - to generate sql code files would be a neat way to go if text files is what you wanted. Or...just having the code rendered back to a proc - which would in turn - run the dynamic pl/sql - that too would be cool.
>>
>>Hey quick question..have you had success with global temp tables??? I miss that feature in sql server...
>
>Can't say that I have used them that I can remember. I do make use of cursors in procs quite often, and have used the DBMS_SQL functions to dynamically create a cursor. While I know what the cursor structure will look like, I don't know the selection criteria or the order by chosen by the users. So I dynamically create the SQL SELECT in a proc then pass that SQL to another proc that builds a cursor using DBMS_SQL based on that generated SQL. All of this is in the context of looping through matching records from a User's Inquiry on an intranet search page and rendering them into an HTML results table.
>
>If we ever upgraded to a newer version of Oracle, I could probably switch to XML and simplify things a bit, but I ain't holding my breath around here.