Advanced Oracle PL/SQL Programming with Packages

17.3. What Is "Online Help" for Stored Code?

First of all, let me make a distinction and set some scope for this chapter: I am not talking about online help for PL/SQL itself (such as "what is the syntax of the OPEN statement?"). Instead, I want to address how to provide online help for PL/SQL programs that you or I might write and then make available to others. So when I say "online help for PL/SQL," I mean online instructions on how to use custom-built and prebuilt PL/SQL programs that have been stored in a database and on which you have execute authority.^[1]

^[1] You could, by the way, also use this package and techniques to provide online help for builtins of the PL/SQL language.

Let's now run through the same scenario I presented at the beginning of the chapter, this time with online help for PL/SQL available.

All right, now I want to parse a string into separate tokens. Let's see, that's gotta be the PLVlex package and the getnext function.

SQL> VARIABLE toke VARCHAR2(30);
SQL> exec :toke := PLVlex.getnext ('this is it');
begin :toke := PLVlex.getnext ('this is it'); end;
 *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-06550: line 1, column 23:
PLS-00302: component 'GETNEXT' must be declared
ORA-06550: line 1, column 7:
PL/SQL: Statement ignored

Well, that didn't work. Admit it, Steven, you forgot how to use your own code. Time to get some help.

SQL> exec PLVlex.help Help for PLVLEX Overview: provides lexical analysis and functions for strings. =================================================================== ...