Creating trigger which throws an exception on insert - sql

Question

Hello fellow programmers and happy new year to you all!
I have few university tasks for winter break and one of them is to create trigger on table:
PERSON(ID, Name, Surname, Age);
Trigger is supposed to inform user when they have inserted row with invalid ID. Vadility criteria is that ID is 11 digits long.
I tried to write solution like this:
CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER person_id_trigg
AFTER INSERT
ON person
DECLARE
idNew VARCHAR(50);
lengthException EXCEPTION;
BEGIN
SELECT id INTO idNew FROM INSERTED;
IF LENGTH(idNew) <> 11 THEN
RAISE lengthException;
END IF;
EXCEPTION
WHEN lengthException THEN
dbms_output.put_line('ID for new person is INVALID. It must be 11 digits long!');
END;
Then I realized that INSERTED exists only in sqlserver and not in oracle.
What would you suggest I could do to fix that?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Do you want to raise an exception (which would prevent the insert from succeeding)? Or do you want to allow the insert to succeed and write a string to the dbms_output buffer that may or may not exist and may or may not be shown to a human running the insert?
In either case, you'll want this to be a row-level trigger, not a statement-level trigger, so you'll need to add the for each row clause.
CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER person_id_trigg
AFTER INSERT
ON person
FOR EACH ROW
If you want to raise an exception
BEGIN
IF( length( :new.id ) <> 11 )
THEN
RAISE_APPLICATION_ERROR( -20001,
'The new ID value must have a length of 11' );
END IF;
END;
If you want to potentially print output but allow the insert to succeed
BEGIN
IF( length( :new.id ) <> 11 )
THEN
dbms_output.put_line( 'The new ID value must have a length of 11' );
END IF;
END;
Of course, in reality, you would never use a trigger for this sort of thing. In the real world, you would use a constraint.