This chapter describes two types of PL/SQL control statements : conditional control statements and sequential control statements. Almost every piece of code you write will require conditional control, which is the ability to direct the flow of execution through your program based on a condition. You do this with IF-THEN-ELSE and CASE statements (CASE statements are available in Oracle9i Database and Oracle Database 10g). There are also CASE expressions ; while not the same as CASE statements, they can sometimes be used to eliminate the need for an IF or CASE statement altogether. Far less often, you will need to tell PL/SQL to transfer control unconditionally via the GOTO statement, or explicitly to do nothing via the NULL statement.
The IF statement allows you to design conditional logic into your programs. With it, you’ll be able to implement requirements such as:
If the salary is between ten and twenty thousand, then apply a bonus of $1,500.
If the salary is between twenty and forty thousand, apply a bonus of $1,000.
If the salary is over forty thousand, give the employee a bonus of $500.
or:
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The IF statement comes in three flavors, as shown in the following table:
IF type | Characteristics |
|---|---|
IF THEN END IF;
| This is the simplest form of the IF statement. The condition between IF and THEN determines whether the set of statements between THEN and END IF should be executed. If the condition evaluates to FALSE, the code is not executed. |
IF THEN ELSE END IF;
| This combination implements an either/or logic: based on the condition between the IF and THEN keywords, execute the code either between THEN and ELSE or between ELSE and END IF. One of these two sections of executable statements is performed. |
IF THEN ELSIF ELSE END IF;
| This last and most complex form of the IF statement selects a condition that is TRUE from a series of mutually exclusive conditions and then executes the set of statements associated with that condition. If you’re writing IF statements like this using any release from Oracle9i Database Release 1 onwards, you should consider using searched CASE statements instead. |
The general format of the IF-THEN syntax is as follows:
IFconditionTHEN... sequence of executable statements ...END IF;
The condition is a Boolean variable, constant, or expression that evaluates to TRUE, FALSE, or NULL. If condition evaluates to TRUE, the executable statements found after the THEN keyword and before the matching END IF statement are executed. If condition evaluates to FALSE or NULL, those statements are not executed.
The following IF condition compares two different numeric values. Remember that if one of these two values is NULL, then the entire expression returns NULL. In the following example, the bonus is not given when salary is NULL:
IF salary > 40000
THEN
give_bonus (employee_id,500);
END IF;There are exceptions to the rule that a NULL in a Boolean expression leads to a NULL result. Some operators and functions are specifically designed to deal with NULLs in a way that leads to TRUE and FALSE (and not NULL) results. For example, you can use IS NULL to test for the presence of a NULL:
IF salary > 40000 OR salary IS NULL
THEN
give_bonus (employee_id,500);
END IF;In this example, “salary IS NULL” evaluates to TRUE in the event that salary has no value, and otherwise to FALSE. Employees whose salaries are missing will now get bonuses too. (As indeed they probably should, considering their employer was so inconsiderate as to lose track of their pay in the first place.)
Tip
Using operators such as IS NULL and IS NOT NULL, or functions such as COALESCE and NVL2, are good ways to detect and deal with potentially NULL values. For every variable that you reference in every Boolean expression that you write, be sure to think carefully about the consequences if that variable is NULL.
It’s not necessary to put the IF, THEN, and END IF keywords on their own lines. In fact, line breaks don’t matter at all for any type of IF statement. You could just as easily write:
IF salary > 40000 THEN give_bonus (employee_id,500); END IF;
Putting everything on one line is perfectly fine for simple IF statements such as the one shown here. However, when writing IF statements of any complexity at all, you’ll find that readability is much greater when you format the statement such that each keyword begins a new line. For example, the following code would be very difficult to follow if it were all crammed on a single line. Actually, it’s difficult to follow as it appears on three lines:
IF salary > 40000 THEN INSERT INTO employee_bonus (eb_employee_id, eb_bonus_amt)
VALUES (employee_id, 500); UPDATE emp_employee SET emp_bonus_given=1 WHERE emp_
employee_id=employee_id; END IF;Ugh! Who’d want to spend time figuring that out? It’s much more readable when formatted nicely:
IF salary > 40000
THEN
INSERT INTO employee_bonus
(eb_employee_id, eb_bonus_amt)
VALUES (employee_id, 500);
UPDATE emp_employee
SET emp_bonus_given=1
WHERE emp_employee_id=employee_id;
END IF;This readability issue becomes even more important when using the ELSE and ELSIF keywords, and when nesting one IF statement inside the other. Take full advantage of indents and formatting to make the logic of your IF statements easily decipherable. Future maintenance programmers will thank you.
Use the IF-THEN-ELSE format when you want to choose between two mutually exclusive actions. The format of this either/or version of the IF statement is as follows:
IFconditionTHEN... TRUE sequence of executable statements ...ELSE... FALSE/NULL sequence of executable statements ...END IF;
The condition is a Boolean variable, constant, or expression. If condition evaluates to TRUE, the executable statements found after the THEN keyword and before the ELSE keyword are executed (the “TRUE sequence of executable statements”). If condition evaluates to FALSE or NULL, the executable statements that come after the ELSE keyword and before the matching END IF keywords are executed (the “FALSE/NULL sequence of executable statements “).
The important thing to remember is that one of the two sequences of statements will always execute, because IF-THEN-ELSE is an either/or construct. Once the appropriate set of statements has been executed, control passes to the statement immediately following the END IF keyword.
Following is an example of the IF-THEN-ELSE construct that builds upon the IF-THEN example shown in the previous section:
IF salary <= 40000
THEN
give_bonus (employee_id, 0);
ELSE
give_bonus (employee_id, 500);
END IF;In this example, employees with a salary greater than 40,000 will get a bonus of 500 while all other employees will get no bonus at all. Or will they? What happens if salary, for whatever reason, happens to be NULL for a given employee? In that case, the statements following the ELSE will be executed, and the employee in question will get the bonus that is supposed to go only to highly paid employees. That’s not good (well, it was good in the last section, but not now)! If you’re not sure that salary will never be NULL, you can protect yourself against this problem using the NVL function :
IF NVL(salary,0) <= 40000
THEN
give_bonus (employee_id, 0);
ELSE
give_bonus (employee_id, 500);
END IF;The NVL function will return zero any time salary is NULL, ensuring that any employees with a NULL salary also get a zero bonus (those poor employees).
This last form of the IF statement comes in handy when you have to implement logic that has many alternatives; it is not an either/or situation. The IF-ELSIF formulation provides a way to handle multiple conditions within a single IF statement. In general, you should use ELSIF with mutually exclusive alternatives (i.e., only one condition can be TRUE for any execution of the IF statement). The general format for this variation of IF is:
IFcondition-1THENstatements-1ELSIFcondition-NTHENstatements-N[ELSEelse_statements] END IF;
Warning
Be very careful to use ELSIF, not ELSEIF. The inadvertent use of ELSEIF is a fairly common syntax error. ELSE IF (two words) doesn’t work either.
Logically speaking, the IF-THEN-ELSIF construct is one way to implement CASE statement functionality in PL/SQL. Of course, if you are using Oracle9i Database onwards, you are probably better off actually using a CASE statement (discussed later in this chapter).
Each ELSIF clause must have a THEN after its condition. Only the ELSE keyword does not need the THEN keyword. The ELSE clause in the IF-ELSIF is the “otherwise” of the statement. If none of the conditions evaluate to TRUE, the statements in the ELSE clause are executed. But the ELSE clause is optional. You can code an IF-ELSIF that has only IF and ELSIF clauses. In such a case, if none of the conditions are TRUE, no statements inside the IF block are executed.
Following is an implementation of the complete bonus logic described at the beginning of this chapter using the IF-THEN-ELSEIF combination:
IF salary BETWEEN 10000 AND 20000
THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1500);
ELSIF salary BETWEEN 20000 AND 40000
THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1000);
ELSIF salary > 40000
THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 500);
ELSE
give_bonus(employee_id, 0);
END IF;The conditions in the IF-ELSIF are always evaluated in the order of first condition to last condition. If two conditions evaluate to TRUE, the statements for the first such condition are executed. With respect to the current example, a salary of 20,000 will result in a bonus of 1,500 even though that 20,000 salary also satisfies the condition for a 1,000 bonus (BETWEEN is inclusive). Once a condition evaluates to TRUE, the remaining conditions are not evaluated at all.
Tip
The CASE statement available beginning in Oracle9i Database represents a better solution to the bonus problem than the IF-THEN-ELSIF solution shown in this section. See the later section "CASE Statements.”
Even though overlapping conditions are allowed in an IF-THEN-ELSIF statement, it’s best to avoid them when possible. In our case, the original spec is a bit ambiguous about how to handle boundary cases such as 20,000. Assuming that the intent is to give the highest bonuses to the lowest-paid employees (which seems like a reasonable approach to us), we would dispense with the BETWEEN operator and use the following less-than/greater-than logic. Note that we’ve also dispensed with the ELSE clause just to illustrate that it is optional:
IF salary >= 10000 AND salary <= 20000
THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1500);
ELSIF salary > 20000 AND salary <= 40000
THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1000);
ELSIF salary > 40000
THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 400);
END IF;By taking steps to avoid overlapping conditions in an IF-THEN-ELSIF, we are eliminating a possible (probable?) source of confusion for programmers who come after us. We also eliminate the possibility of inadvertent bugs being introduced as a result of someone’s reordering the ELSIF clauses.
You can nest any IF statement within any other IF statement. The following IF statement shows several layers of nesting:
IFcondition1THEN IFcondition2THENstatements2ELSE IFcondition3THENstatements3ELSIFcondition4THENstatements4END IF; END IF; END IF;
Nested IF statements are often necessary to implement complex logic rules, but you should use them carefully. Nested IF statements, like nested loops, can be very difficult to understand and debug. If you find that you need to nest more than three levels deep in your conditional logic, you should review that logic and see if there is a simpler way to code the same requirement. If not, then consider creating one or more local modules to hide the innermost IF statements.
A key advantage to the nested IF structure is that it defers evaluation of inner conditions. The conditions of an inner IF statement are evaluated only if the condition for the outer IF statement that encloses them evaluates to TRUE. Therefore, one obvious reason to nest IF statements is to evaluate one condition only when another condition is TRUE. For example, in our code to award bonuses, we might write the following:
IF award_bonus(employee_id) THEN
IF print_check (employee_id) THEN
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('Check issued for ' || employee_id);
END IF;
END IF;This is reasonable, because we want to print a message for each bonus check issued, but we don’t want to print a bonus check for a zero amount in cases where no bonus was given.
PL/SQL uses short-circuit evaluation , which means that PL/SQL need not evaluate all of the expression in an IF statement. For example, when evaluating the expression in the following IF statement, PL/SQL stops evaluation and immediately executes the ELSE branch if the first operand is either FALSE or NULL:
IFcondition1ANDcondition2THEN ... ELSE ... END IF;
PL/SQL can stop evaluation of the expression when condition1 is FALSE or NULL, because the THEN branch is executed only when the result of the expression is TRUE, and that requires both operands to be TRUE. As soon as one operand is found to be other than TRUE, there is no longer any chance for the THEN branch to be taken.
Tip
We found something interesting while researching PL/SQL’s short-circuit behavior. The behavior that you get depends on the expression’s context. Consider the following statement:
my_boolean:=condition1ANDcondition2
Unlike the case with an IF statement, when condition1 is NULL, this expression will not short-circuit. Why not? Because the result could be either NULL or FALSE, depending on condition2. For an IF statement, NULL and FALSE both lead to the ELSE branch, so a short-circuit can occur. But for an assignment, the ultimate value must be known, and short-circuiting, in this case, can (and will) occur only when condition1 is FALSE.
Similar to the case with AND, if the first operand of an OR operation in an IF statement is TRUE, PL/SQL immediately executes the THEN branch:
IFcondition1ORcondition2THEN ... ELSE ... END IF;
This short-circuiting behavior can be useful when one of your conditions is particularly expensive in terms of CPU or memory utilization. In such a case, be sure to place that condition second:
IFlow_CPU_conditionANDhigh_CPU_conditionTHEN ... END IF;
The low_CPU_condition is evaluated first, and if the result is enough to determine the end result of the AND operation (i.e., the result is FALSE), the more expensive condition will not be evaluated, and your application’s performance is the better for that evaluation not happening.
Warning
However, if you are depending on that second condition’s being evaluated, perhaps because you want the side effects from a stored function that the condition invokes, then you have a problem and you need to reconsider your design. We don’t believe it’s good to depend on side effects in this manner.
You can achieve the effect of short-circuit evaluation in a much more explicit manner using a nested IF statement:
IFlow_CPU_conditionTHEN IFhigh_CPU_conditionTHEN ... END IF; END IF;
Now, high_CPU_condition is evaluated only if low_CPU_condition evaluates to TRUE. This is the same effect as short-circuit evaluation, but it’s more obvious at a glance what’s going on. It’s also more obvious that our intent is to evaluate low_CPU_condition first.
Short-circuiting also applies to CASE statements and CASE expressions. These are described in the next section.
The CASE statement allows you to select one sequence of statements to execute out of many possible sequences. They have been part of the SQL standard since 1992, although Oracle SQL didn’t support CASE until the release of Oracle8i Database,
and PL/SQL didn’t support CASE until Oracle9i Database Release 1. From this release onwards, the following types of CASE statements are supported:
- Simple CASE statement
Associates each of one or more sequences of PL/SQL statements with a value. Chooses which sequence of statements to execute based on an expression that returns one of those values.
- Searched CASE statement
Chooses which of one or more sequences of PL/SQL statements to execute by evaluating a list of Boolean conditions. The sequence of statements associated with the first condition that evaluates to TRUE is executed.
In addition to CASE statements, PL/SQL also supports CASE expressions . A CASE expression is very similar in form to a CASE statement and allows you to choose which of one or more expressions to evaluate. The result of a CASE expression is a single value, whereas the result of a CASE statement is the execution of a sequence of PL/SQL statements.
A simple CASE statement allows you to choose which of several sequences of PL/SQL statements to execute based on the results of a single expression. Simple CASE statements take the following form:
CASEexpressionWHENresult1THENstatements1WHENresult2THENstatements2... ELSEstatements_elseEND CASE;
The ELSE portion of the statement is optional. When evaluating such a CASE statement, PL/SQL first evaluates expression. It then compares the result of expression with result1. If the two results match, statements1 is executed. Otherwise, result2 is checked, and so forth.
Following is an example of a simple CASE statement that uses the employee type as a basis for selecting the proper bonus algorithm:
CASE employee_type
WHEN 'S' THEN
award_salary_bonus(employee_id);
WHEN 'H' THEN
award_hourly_bonus(employee_id);
WHEN 'C' THEN
award_commissioned_bonus(employee_id);
ELSE
RAISE invalid_employee_type;
END CASE;This CASE statement has an explicit ELSE clause; however, the ELSE is optional. When you do not explicitly specify an ELSE clause of your own, PL/SQL implicitly uses the following:
ELSE
RAISE CASE_NOT_FOUND;In other words, if you don’t specify an ELSE clause, and none of the results in the WHEN clauses match the result of the CASE expression, PL/SQL raises a CASE_NOT_FOUND error. This behavior is different from what we’re used to with IF statements. When an IF statement lacks an ELSE clause, nothing happens when the condition is not met. With CASE, the analogous situation leads to an error.
By now you’re probably wondering how, or even whether, the bonus logic shown earlier in this chapter can be implemented using a simple CASE statement. At first glance, it doesn’t appear possible. However, a bit of creative thought yields the following solution:
CASE TRUE
WHEN salary >= 10000 AND salary <=20000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1500);
WHEN salary > 20000 AND salary <= 40000
give_bonus(employee_id, 1000);
WHEN salary > 40000
give_bonus(employee_id, 500);
ELSE
give_bonus(employee_id, 0);
END CASE;The point we are trying to make with this solution, aside from the fact that you sometimes need to code creatively, is that the expression and result elements shown in the earlier syntax diagram can be either scalar values or expressions that evaluate to scalar values.
If you look back to the earlier IF-THEN-ELSIF statement implementing this same bonus logic, you’ll see that we specified an ELSE clause for the CASE implementation, whereas we didn’t specify an ELSE for the IF-THEN-ELSIF solution. The reason for the addition of the ELSE is simple: if no bonus conditions are met, the IF statement does nothing, effectively resulting in a zero bonus. A CASE statement, however, will raise an error if no conditions are met—hence the need to code explicitly for the zero bonus case.
Tip
To avoid CASE_NOT_FOUND errors, be sure that it’s impossible for one of your conditions not to be met.
While our previous CASE TRUE statement may look like a clever hack, it’s really an explicit implementation of the searched CASE statement, which we talk about in the next section.
A searched CASE statement evaluates a list of Boolean expressions and, when it finds an expression that evaluates to TRUE, executes a sequence of statements associated with that expression. Essentially, a searched CASE statement is the equivalent of the CASE TRUE statement shown in the previous section.
Searched CASE statements have the following form:
CASE
WHENexpression1 THEN
statements1
WHEN expression2 THEN
statements2
...
ELSE
statements_else
END CASE;A searched CASE statement is a perfect fit for the problem of implementing the bonus logic. For example:
CASE
WHEN salary >= 10000 AND salary <=20000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1500);
WHEN salary > 20000 AND salary <= 40000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1000);
WHEN salary > 40000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 500);
ELSE
give_bonus(employee_id, 0);
END CASE;As with simple CASE statements, the following rules apply:
Execution ends once a sequence of statements has been executed. If more than one expression evaluates to TRUE, only the statements associated with the first such expression are executed.
The ELSE clause is optional. If no ELSE is specified, and no expressions evaluate to TRUE, then a CASE_NOT_FOUND exception is raised.
WHEN clauses are evaluated in order, from top to bottom.
Following is an implementation of our bonus logic that takes advantage of the fact that WHEN clauses are evaluated in the order in which we write them. The individual expressions are simpler, but is the intent of the statement as easily grasped?
CASE
WHEN salary > 40000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 500);
WHEN salary > 20000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1000);
WHEN salary >= 10000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1500);
ELSE
give_bonus(employee_id, 0);
END CASE;If a given employee’s salary is 20,000, then the first expression and second expression will evaluate to FALSE. The third expression will evaluate to TRUE, and that employee will be awarded a bonus of 1,500. If an employee’s salary is 21,000, then the second expression will evaluate to TRUE, and the employee will be awarded a bonus of 1,000. Execution of the CASE statement will cease with the first WHEN condition that evaluates to TRUE, so a salary of 21,000 will never reach the third condition.
It’s arguable whether you should take this approach to writing CASE statements. You should certainly be aware that it’s possible to write such a statement, and you should watch for such order-dependent logic in programs that you are called upon to modify or debug.
Order-dependent logic can be a subtle source of bugs when you decide to reorder the WHEN clauses in a CASE statement. Consider the following searched CASE statement in which, assuming a salary of 20,000, both WHEN expressions evaluate to TRUE:
CASE
WHEN salary BETWEEN 10000 AND 20000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1500);
WHEN salary BETWEEN 20000 AND 40000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1000);
...Imagine the results if a future programmer unthinkingly decides to make the code neater by reordering the WHEN clauses in descending order by salary. Don’t scoff at this possibility! We programmers frequently fiddle with perfectly fine, working code to satisfy some inner sense of order. Following is the CASE statement rewritten with the WHEN clauses in descending order:
CASE
WHEN salary BETWEEN 20000 AND 40000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1000);
WHEN salary BETWEEN 10000 AND 20000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1500);
...Looks good, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, because of the slight overlap between the two WHEN clauses, we’ve introduced a subtle bug into the code. Now an employee with a salary of 20,000 gets a bonus of 1,000 rather than the intended 1,500. There may be cases where overlap between WHEN clauses is desirable, but avoid it when feasible. Always remember that order matters, and resist the urge to fiddle with working code.
Tip
Because WHEN clauses are evaluated in order, you may be able to squeeze some extra efficiency out of your code by listing the most likely WHEN clauses first. In addition, if you have WHEN clauses with “expensive” expressions (e.g., requiring lots of CPU and memory), you may want to list those last in order to minimize the chances that they will be evaluated. See the previous discussion under "Nested IF Statements" for an example of this issue.
Use searched CASE statements when you want to use Boolean expressions as a basis for identifying a set of statements to execute. Use simple CASE statements when you can base that decision on the result of a single expression.
CASE statements can be nested just as IF statements can. For example, the following rather difficult-to-follow implementation of our bonus logic uses a nested CASE statement:
CASE
WHEN salary >= 10000 THEN
CASE
WHEN salary <= 20000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1500);
WHEN salary > 40000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 500);
WHEN salary > 20000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id, 1000);
END CASE
;
WHEN salary < 10000 THEN
give_bonus(employee_id,0);
END CASE;Any type of statement may be used within a CASE statement, so we could replace the inner CASE statement with an IF statement. Likewise, any type of statement, including CASE statements, may be nested within an IF statement.
CASE expressions do for expressions what CASE statements do for statements. Simple CASE expressions let you choose an expression to evaluate based on a scalar value that you provide as input. Searched CASE expressions evaluate a list of expressions to find the first one that evaluates to TRUE, and then return the results of an associated expression.
CASE expressions take the following two forms:
Simple_Case_Expression :=
CASEexpression
WHEN result1 THEN
result_expression1
WHEN result2 THEN
result_expression2
...
ELSE
result_expression_else
END;
Searched_Case_Expression :=
CASE
WHEN expression1 THEN
result_expression1
WHEN expression2 THEN
result_expression2
...
ELSE
result_expression_else
END;A CASE expression returns a single value, the result of whichever result_expression is chosen. Each WHEN clause must be associated with exactly one expression (no statements). Do not use semicolons or END CASE to mark the end of the CASE expression. CASE expressions are terminated by a simple END.
Following is an example of a simple CASE expression being used with the DBMS_OUTPUT package to output the value of a Boolean variable. (Recall that the PUT_LINE program is not overloaded to handle Boolean types.) In this example, the CASE expression converts the Boolean value into a character string, which PUT_LINE can then handle:
DECLARE
boolean_true BOOLEAN := TRUE;
boolean_false BOOLEAN := FALSE;
boolean_null BOOLEAN;
FUNCTION boolean_to_varchar2 (flag IN BOOLEAN) RETURN VARCHAR2 IS
BEGIN
RETURN
CASE flag
WHEN TRUE THEN 'True'
WHEN FALSE THEN 'False'
ELSE 'NULL' END;
END;
BEGIN
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(boolean_to_varchar2(boolean_true));
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(boolean_to_varchar2(boolean_false));
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(boolean_to_varchar2(boolean_null));
END;A searched CASE expression can be used to implement our bonus logic, returning the proper bonus value for any given salary:
DECLARE
salary NUMBER := 20000;
employee_id NUMBER := 36325;
PROCEDURE give_bonus (emp_id IN NUMBER, bonus_amt IN NUMBER) IS
BEGIN
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(emp_id);
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(bonus_amt);
END;
BEGIN
give_bonus(employee_id,
CASE
WHEN salary >= 10000 AND salary <=20000 THEN 1500
WHEN salary > 20000 AND salary <= 40000 THEN 1000
WHEN salary > 40000 THEN 500
ELSE 0
END);
END;You can use a CASE expression anywhere you can use any other type of expression or value. The following example uses a CASE expression to compute a bonus amount, multiplies that amount by 10, and assigns the result to a variable that is displayed via DBMS_OUTPUT:
DECLARE
salary NUMBER := 20000;
employee_id NUMBER := 36325;
bonus_amount NUMBER;
BEGIN
bonus_amount :=
CASE
WHEN salary >= 10000 AND salary <=20000 THEN 1500
WHEN salary > 20000 AND salary <= 40000 THEN 1000
WHEN salary > 40000 THEN 500
ELSE 0
END * 10;
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(bonus_amount);
END;Unlike with the CASE statement, no error is raised in the event that no WHEN clause is selected in a CASE expression. Instead, when no WHEN conditions are met, a CASE expression will return NULL.
The GOTO statement performs unconditional branching to another executable statement in the same execution section of a PL/SQL block. As with other constructs in the language, if you use GOTO appropriately and with care, your programs will be stronger for it.
The general format for a GOTO statement is:
GOTOlabel_name;where label_name is the name of a label identifying the target statement. This GOTO label is defined in the program as follows:
<<label_name>>You must surround the label name with double enclosing angle brackets (<< >>). When PL/SQL encounters a GOTO statement, it immediately shifts control to the first executable statement following the label. Following is a complete code block containing both a GOTO and a label:
BEGIN
GOTO second_output;
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('This line will never execute.');
<<second_output>>
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('We are here!');
END;There are several restrictions on the GOTO statement:
At least one executable statement must follow a label.
The target label must be in the same scope as the GOTO statement.
The target label must be in the same part of the PL/SQL block as the GOTO.
Contrary to popular opinion (including ours), the GOTO statement can come in handy. There are cases where a GOTO statement can simplify the logic in your program. On the other hand, because PL/SQL provides so many different control constructs and modularization techniques, you can almost always find a better way to do something than with a GOTO.
Usually when you write a statement in a program, you want it to do something. There are cases, however, when you want to tell PL/SQL to do absolutely nothing, and that is where the NULL statement comes in handy. The NULL statement has the following format:
NULL;
Well, you wouldn’t want a do-nothing statement to be complicated, would you? The NULL statement is simply the reserved word NULL followed by a semicolon (;) to indicate that this is a statement and not a NULL value. The NULL statement does nothing except pass control to the next executable statement.
Why would you want to use the NULL statement? There are several reasons, described in the following sections.
Sometimes, it’s helpful to avoid any ambiguity inherent in an IF statement that doesn’t cover all possible cases. For example, when you write an IF statement, you do not have to include an ELSE clause. To produce a report based on a selection, you can code:
IF :report.selection = 'DETAIL'
THEN
exec_detail_report;
END IF;What should the program be doing if the report selection is not ‘DETAIL'? One might assume that the program is supposed to do nothing. But because this is not explicitly stated in the code, you are left to wonder if perhaps there was an oversight. If, on the other hand, you include an explicit ELSE clause that does nothing, you state very clearly, “Don’t worry, I thought about this possibility and I really want nothing to happen:”
IF :report.selection = 'DETAIL'
THEN
exec_detail_report;
ELSE
NULL; -- Do nothing
END IF;Our example here was of an IF statement, but the same principle applies when writing CASE statements and CASE expressions. Similarly, if you want to temporarily remove all the code from a function or procedure, and yet still invoke that function or procedure, you can use NULL as a placeholder. Otherwise, you cannot compile a function or procedure without having any lines of code within it.
The optional exception section of a program contains one or more exception handlers. These handlers trap and handle errors that have been raised in your program. The structure and flow of the exception section is similar in structure and flow to a conditional CASE statement, as follows:
EXCEPTION
WHENexception_name1
THEN
executable_statements;
WHEN exception_nameN
THEN
executable_statements;
WHEN OTHERS
THEN
executable_statements;
END;If exception_name1 is raised, then execute its statements; if exception_nameN is raised, then execute its statements; and so on. The WHEN OTHERS clause handles any exceptions not handled in the previous WHEN clauses (it is just like the ELSE clause of the IF statement). When you don’t want to write any special code to handle an exception, you can use the NULL statement to make sure that a raised exception halts execution of the current PL/SQL block but does not propagate any exceptions to enclosing blocks:
PROCEDURE calc_avg_sales
BEGIN
:sales.avg := :sales.month1 / :sales.total;
EXCEPTION
WHEN ZERO_DIVIDE
THEN
:sales.avg := 0;
RAISE FORM_TRIGGER_FAILURE;
WHEN OTHERS
THEN
NULL;
END;If total sales are zero, then an exception is raised, the average is set to zero, and the trigger processing in Oracle Forms is halted. If any other exceptions occur (such as VALUE_ERROR, which would be raised if the number generated by the calculation is larger than the sales.avg item allows), the WHEN OTHERS clause gets control, handles the exception by doing nothing (i.e., executes the NULL statement), and processing continues. Because the exception is handled, it is not raised to the enclosing block. (See Chapter 6 for more detailed information about exceptions.)
In some cases, you can pair NULL with GOTO to avoid having to execute additional statements. Most of you will never have to use the GOTO statement; there are very few occasions where it is truly needed. If you ever do use GOTO, however, you should remember that when you GOTO a label, at least one executable statement must follow that label. In the following example, I use a GOTO statement to quickly move to the end of my program if the state of my data indicates that no further processing is required:
PROCEDURE process_data (data_in IN orders%ROWTYPE,
data_action IN VARCHAR2) IS
BEGIN
-- First in series of validations.
IF data_in.ship_date IS NOT NULL
THEN
status := validate_shipdate (data_in.ship_date);
IF status != 0 THEN GOTO end_of_procedure;
END IF;
-- Second in series of validations.
IF data_in.order_date IS NOT NULL
THEN
status := validate_orderdate (data_in.order_date);
IF status != 0 THEN GOTO end_of_procedure;
END IF;
... more validations ...
<< end_of_procedure >>
NULL;
END;With this approach, if I encounter an error in any single section, I use the GOTO to bypass all remaining validation checks. Because I do not have to do anything at the termination of the procedure, I place a NULL statement after the label because at least one executable statement is required there. Even though NULL does nothing, it is still an executable statement.
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