Oracle Advanced PL/SQL Developer Professional Guide

PL/SQL collection methods

Oracle provides a set of methods which can be used in conjunction with collections in PL/SQL blocks. These methods access a collection type variable and perform relevant activities such as extension, trimming, and deleting collection elements. Besides these activities, few methods also provide information about the collection such as COUNT and EXISTS. These utilities are known as collection methods and they are not a built-in subprogram, because they can be used exclusively in conjunction with collections.

The common syntax for all the collection methods is as follows:

[COLLECTION].METHOD (PARAMETERS)

EXISTS

The EXISTS function checks the existence of an element in a collection. The general syntax of this function is EXISTS(<index>) ...