pipelining data between pipeline functions

[steph]

hello,

database version is 10.2.0.3

i'm trying to use pipeline function for transferring and transforming
data. some questions arise ...

Type definitions might look like this:

create type lwps_type as object
(LWPS_ID NUMBER
, ...)
/

create type lwps_type_set as table of lwps_type;
/

pipeline function might look like this:

CREATE OR REPLACE function pfms_vgr_2nd(p_invals in sys_refcursor)
return lwps_type_set pipelined
is
out_rec lwps_type:=lwps_type(null,null,null,null,null,null,null,null
,null,null,null,null,null,null,null,null);
--in_rec pfms_vgr_type:=pfms_vgr_type(null,null);
--in_rec pfms_vgr_type_set%rowtype;
vgr_kurz varchar2(5);
vgr_bez varchar2(40);
pgr_bezeichnung varchar2(40);
begin
loop
fetch p_invals into vgr_kurz,vgr_bez,pgr_bezeichnung;
exit when p_invals%notfound;
out_rec.LWPS_ID:=null;
out_rec.LWPS_INS_ID:=null;
...
out_rec.LWPS_REFERENT:=null;
out_rec.LWAPS_GRUPPENBEZEICHUNG:=pgr_bezeichnung;
pipe row(out_rec);
end loop;
return;
end;
/

And my query might look like this:

select * from table(pfms_vgr_2nd(cursor(select * from
table(pfms_vgr_stage))))
/

Question #1:
I've decided to use a weak ref cursor (sys_refcursor) as an explicitly
defined ref cursor would require a record type to be defined - and I
wanted to spare me the redundancy of having an object type and a
record type holding exactly the same information. Or is it possible to
use an object type to define a ref cursor?

Question #2:
Originally I have defined my function like this (again to avoid
redundancy in declaring data-types):

CREATE OR REPLACE function pfms_vgr_2nd(p_invals in sys_refcursor)
return lwps_type_set pipelined
is
...
in_rec pfms_vgr_type:=pfms_vgr_type(null,null);
--in_rec pfms_vgr_type_set%rowtype; ... i also tried this one -
but this is leading to an ora-600!
begin
loop
fetch p_invals into in_rec;
...

But then my query
select * from table(pfms_vgr_2nd(cursor(select * from
table(pfms_vgr_stage))))
raises an "ORA-00932 inconsistent datatypes"-error.

Or is it possible to transform the query so that this error does not
appear? I've tried with cast() - but to no success.

ok, I hope i was sufficiently clear in describing my questions -
allthough I'm not quite sure about this. anyway, thanks for any input,

Stephan

[steph]

Solved it by moving everything into a package. So I'm now having
record types instead of object types in the package definition which
can be reused in the pipeline functions - thus avoiding any redundancy
in type definitions. And everything is in one place now. beautiful!