Issue when creating a stored procedure - sql

Question

I'm trying to create a stored procedure as follows:
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE storedprocedure(emp number) AS
BEGIN
DECLARE
-- create the cursor based on a query
cursor emp_cursor is
select e.employeeid, firstname, lastname, e.departmentid, e.title,
salary, d.departmentname, billrate
from employees e
full join departments d on e.departmentID = d.departmentID
full join employeeproject p on e.employeeID = p.employeeID where e.employeeID = emp;
BEGIN
open emp_cursor;
-- first display information about the employee
dbms_output.put_line('- -');
dbms_output.put_line('- -');
dbms_output.put_line('Employee#' || e.employeeid
|| ' Name:' || TRIM(e.firstname) || ' ' || TRIM(e.lastname)
|| ' Dept: ');
dbms_output.put_line('_________________________________________________________');
dbms_output.put_line('- -');
dbms_output.put_line('- - Title: ' || e.title
|| ' Salary: ' || to_char(e.salary,'$999,999,999.99'));
dbms_output.put_line('- - Billing Rate: ' || to_char(billrate,'$999,999.99'));
-- next call the stored procedure to show department information
END;
END;
/
But it compiles with errors. When I show errors it tells me e.employeeID, e.title, and billrate must all be declared, but they are the original query. What am I doing wrong here? Am I misunderstand what it means to have them declared?
These are all columns that exist within the tables being queried and running the query as SQL gets results.

Answer 1

You are opening the cursor, but you are not fetching it into anything - either a series of scalar variables or a record type - which would normally be done in a loop. Then when you are in the loop you refer to the variables/record, not the table used in the cursor query - that is out of scope outside the cursor declaration.
There's a slightly simpler implicit cursor loop that you might find a bit easier in this case:
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE storedprocedure(emp number) AS
BEGIN
FOR rec IN (
select e.employeeid, firstname, lastname, e.departmentid, e.title,
salary, d.departmentname, billrate
from employees e
full join departments d on e.departmentID = d.departmentID
full join employeeproject p on e.employeeID = p.employeeID where e.employeeID = emp
)
LOOP
-- first display information about the employee
dbms_output.put_line('- -');
dbms_output.put_line('- -');
dbms_output.put_line('Employee#' || rec.employeeid
|| ' Name:' || TRIM(rec.firstname) || ' ' || TRIM(rec.lastname)
|| ' Dept: ');
dbms_output.put_line('_________________________________________________________');
dbms_output.put_line('- -');
dbms_output.put_line('- - Title: ' || rec.title
|| ' Salary: ' || to_char(rec.salary,'$999,999,999.99'));
dbms_output.put_line('- - Billing Rate: ' || to_char(rec.billrate,'$999,999.99'));
-- next call the stored procedure to show department information
END LOOP;
END;
/
Notice that all the references to columns inside the loop are of the form rec.<field> - they are taken from the record for this time round the loop, not directly from the underlying tables.
You also had a nested block which isn't doing any harm but isn't useful, so I took that out.
If you particularly wanted to use the explicit open-fetch-close cursor handling it would look something like this:
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE storedprocedure(emp number) AS
-- create the cursor based on a query
cursor emp_cursor is
select e.employeeid, firstname, lastname, e.departmentid, e.title,
salary, d.departmentname, billrate
from employees e
full join departments d on e.departmentID = d.departmentID
full join employeeproject p on e.employeeID = p.employeeID where e.employeeID = emp;
-- record variable based on cursor definition
rec emp_cursor%ROWTYPE;
BEGIN
OPEN emp_cursor;
LOOP
-- fetch the next row result from the cursor into the record vairable
FETCH emp_cursor INTO rec;
-- break out of the loop if there are no more results to fetch
EXIT WHEN emp_cursor%NOTFOUND;
-- first display information about the employee
dbms_output.put_line('- -');
dbms_output.put_line('- -');
dbms_output.put_line('Employee#' || rec.employeeid
|| ' Name:' || TRIM(rec.firstname) || ' ' || TRIM(rec.lastname)
|| ' Dept: ');
dbms_output.put_line('_________________________________________________________');
dbms_output.put_line('- -');
dbms_output.put_line('- - Title: ' || rec.title
|| ' Salary: ' || to_char(rec.salary,'$999,999,999.99'));
dbms_output.put_line('- - Billing Rate: ' || to_char(rec.billrate,'$999,999.99'));
-- next call the stored procedure to show department information
END LOOP;
CLOSE emp_cursor;
END;
/