Advanced Oracle PL/SQL Programming with Packages

8.3. Showing Header Toggle

The PLVtab package is designed to be a generic, low-level utility for working with PL/SQL tables. As such, it needs to be as flexible as possible when it comes to displaying the contents of these tables. I found that I wanted to use PLVtab.display both to:

1. Dump the contents of a table for debugging and verification purposes; and

2. Display table contents from within other PL/Vision utilities and packages.

In the first use of PLVtab.display, I could rely on the default header for the table, which is simply:

Contents of Table

since I just wanted to see the results. When I am using PLVtab from within another environment or utility, I need to be able to carefully control the format of the output. In some cases I will want to provide an alternative header, which is done through the parameter list of the display procedure. In other situations, I may want to avoid a header altogether.

The "show header" toggle offers this level of flexibility. The default/initial setting for PLVtab is to display a header with the table. You can turn off the toggle by executing the "no show" procedure as follows:

SQL> exec PLVtab.noshowhdr

In this mode, even if you provide an explicit header in your call to display, that information will be ignored. Only the row information will be displayed.