Oracle documentation sucks
July 28, 2006I gotta say this for Microsoft–whatever you might think about their products, they do make sure everything is thoroughly documented. And if there’s no official documentation, you’re certain to find something thru Google or one of the many Microsoft blog sites.
The same cannot be said for Oracle products. I spent most of today trying to figure out how to use their JSP tag library to run a PL/SQL package that has an out parameter. Now either the tag lib supports out parameters, or it does not. But I could not find a blessed scrap of documentation, discussion thread, or code sample to tell me definitively which. There’s examples showing how to bind an inbound parameter, but none of the examples states that an out parameter is un-supported. And there’s several discussion threads on Oracle’s site where people are asking for help getting an out parameter to work, but there’s no useful responses to any of those threads.
It just doesn’t make sense that they’d go thru the bother of writing a tag library that only lets you bind to in parameters and not out parameters. I mean, it’s their damned database that supports the out parameters, and they wrote these damned tag libs to simplify access to the aforementioned database. It’s frustrating, I’ve tried all sorts of syntax to coax it into working and no joy.
I’ve given up, I’m just going to write the database stuff in Java scriptlet code. To hell with the fact that this is a JSP and I should be using JSP tags. I’m gonna end up with a JSP that’s about 80% Java code and 20% tags/html. And when my boss asks what the hell I’m doing, I’m going to blame Larry Ellison and his crew for not documenting their stuff very well.