IS NOT NULL behavior

[OraMs]

Thanks in advance for your time.

I declared a variable as ROWTYPE for a given table:

v_rec table%ROWTYPE;

An error occurs with the following statement:

IF v_rec IS NOT NULL
THEN
<<some logic>>
END IF;

If I use a column from the table, script executes w/o problems:

IF v_rec.acolumn IS NOT NULL
THEN
<<some logic>>
END IF;

 

[karluk]

Perhaps someone with more experience writing PL/SQL can give you a better answer, but the behavior you describe seems normal to me. Null or not null is a property of a column, not of a row. Therefore the &quot;vrec.acolumn IS NOT NULL&quot; logic works, but the &quot;vrec IS NOT NULL&quot; doesn't.

What condition are you trying to test with &quot;vrec IS NOT NULL&quot;? If you want at least one column of vrec to be not null you will probably have to write code such as

( vrec.acolumn is not null
or vrec.bcolumn is not null
or ...
or vrec.zcolumn is not null)

 

[listener22]

That is correct, karluk.
And, OraMS, if you just want to know whether something
was selected, you can use the <cursor>%FOUND or
<cursor>%ROWCOUNT attributes. Jim

oracle, vb