[cx-oracle-users] Feedback desired on types and binding

[Anthony T. <ant...@gm...>]

The methods cursor.setinputsizes(), cursor.var() and cursor.callfunc()
accept types to indicate what sort of bind variable is desired. These
types are generally the types defined by the DB API but I have added a
number of additional ones to support data types supported by Oracle
but not covered by the DB API. There are a number of cases where the
type indicated by Oracle covers multiple Python types. This is seen
primarily in two places (that I am aware of at the moment). The first
is the desire to return integers from callfunc() and the second is the
desire to return unicode strings directly from cx_Oracle (rather than
have to decode them yourself). A couple of patches have been sent to
me to do both of these things by adding another set of high-level
types. The problem with this is that it further confuses the already
confused type hierarchy. So far all of the types are types from the
Oracle perspective only and I'd like to keep it that way. So, I have
an alternative suggestion which I'd like some feedback on: allow
setinputsizes(), var() and calfunc() to accept Python types and use
these to tweak the type of Python object that will be returned. In
other words

cursor.callfunc("SomeFunction", int, (parm1, parm2))

or

cursor.setinputsizes(someparm = int)

or

cursor.var(int)

In all of the above cases a NUMBER bind variable would be created but
whenever the value of the variable is acquired the type of object
returned would be an integer. The same thing would occur with unicode.

Does this seem reasonable to you? Any comments appreciated. Thank you.

Anthony Tuininga