Oracle db view/system table to check if given part of a package is a Procedure or a Function

Question

I am using the Oracle system tables to get some metadata about the Packages in our database.

Here is one of my queries:

select AP.PROCEDURE_NAME
  from ALL_PROCEDURES ap
 where ap.object_name = :object_name
   and ap.owner=:owner
   and ap.procedure_name is not NULL
   and ap.procedure_name like :procedure_name

I also want to find out if the given object is either a function, a procedure or a type. I can't seem to find a direct way to pull the data directly from a table.

Please Note: I don't want to have to parse it from all_sources.

Answer 1

It turns out that there is a view all_arguments where you can get all the parameters for a method in a package. When the method is a function there is an argument with a null name representing the return value. So if you join against all_arguments you can determine if a given all_procedures entry is a function or a procedure. What follows is an example showing such a select.

select CASE (Select count(*) from ALL_ARGUMENTS aa 
                       where aa.object_name=ap.procedure_name
                         and aa.object_id = ap.object_id 
                         and argument_name is null)
         WHEN 1 THEN 'FUNCTION'
         WHEN 0 THEN 'PROCEDURE'
         ELSE ''
       END as is_function, ap.*
  from all_procedures ap
 where ap.object_name like '<package name>'

Answer 2

SQL> select distinct object_type from user_procedures;

OBJECT_TYPE
-------------------
PROCEDURE
PACKAGE
TRIGGER
FUNCTION

Answer 3

I suspect one won't have any choice. At least it's well formatted -- all the types begin with TYPE, and so on.

You could use SQL*Plus and the DESC command, which does work on packages:

SQL> desc dbms_application_info;
PROCEDURE READ_CLIENT_INFO
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 ------------------------------ ----------------------- ------ --------
 CLIENT_INFO                    VARCHAR2                OUT
PROCEDURE READ_MODULE
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 ------------------------------ ----------------------- ------ --------
 MODULE_NAME                    VARCHAR2                OUT
 ACTION_NAME                    VARCHAR2                OUT
PROCEDURE SET_ACTION
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 ------------------------------ ----------------------- ------ --------
 ACTION_NAME                    VARCHAR2                IN
PROCEDURE SET_CLIENT_INFO
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 ------------------------------ ----------------------- ------ --------
 CLIENT_INFO                    VARCHAR2                IN
PROCEDURE SET_MODULE
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 ------------------------------ ----------------------- ------ --------
 MODULE_NAME                    VARCHAR2                IN
 ACTION_NAME                    VARCHAR2                IN
PROCEDURE SET_SESSION_LONGOPS
 Argument Name                  Type                    In/Out Default?
 ------------------------------ ----------------------- ------ --------
 RINDEX                         BINARY_INTEGER          IN/OUT
 SLNO                           BINARY_INTEGER          IN/OUT
 OP_NAME                        VARCHAR2                IN     DEFAULT
 TARGET                         BINARY_INTEGER          IN     DEFAULT
 CONTEXT                        BINARY_INTEGER          IN     DEFAULT
 SOFAR                          NUMBER                  IN     DEFAULT
 TOTALWORK                      NUMBER                  IN     DEFAULT
 TARGET_DESC                    VARCHAR2                IN     DEFAULT
 UNITS                          VARCHAR2                IN     DEFAULT

By iterating over the packages, and parsing the results -- it's an easier structure to parse than DBA_SOURCE -- you might get what you want. A caveat to remember; packages support overloading so you could have both FUNCTION foo(date) RETURN date, and PROCEDURE foo(varchar). Matching just by name may not be enough.