Understanding Stored Procedure Parameters
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There are four types of parameters that can be associated with stored procedures:
- Input parameters, used to pass values to a stored procedure for processing.
- Output parameters, used by a stored procedure to pass return values to an application.
- Input/output parameters, used to pass values to a stored procedure for processing, and used by the stored procedure to pass return values to the application.
- A result parameter, used to return an error or status value to an application. A stored procedure can only return one result parameter.
Whether a stored procedure uses a particular type of parameter depends both on the general language implementation of stored procedures on your database server and on a specific instance of a stored procedure. For example, individual stored procedures on any server may either be implemented using input parameters, or may not be. On the other hand, some uses of parameters are server-specific. For example, the InterBase implementation of a stored procedure never returns a result parameter.
Access to stored procedure parameters is provided by TParam objects in the TIBStoredProc.Params property. If the name of the stored procedure is specified at design time in the StoredProcName property, a TParam object is automatically created for each parameter and added to the Params property. If the stored procedure name is not specified until runtime, the TParam objects need to be programmatically created at that time. Not specifying the stored procedure and manually creating the TParam objects allows a single TIBStoredProc component to be used with any number of available stored procedures.
Some stored procedures return a dataset in addition to output and result parameters. Applications can display dataset records in data-aware controls, but must separately process output and result parameters. For more information about displaying records in data-aware controls, see Using Stored Procedures that Return Result Sets.
Topics
- Using Input Parameters
- Using Output Parameters
- Using Input/output Parameters
- Using the Result Parameter
- Accessing Parameters at Design Time
- Setting Parameter Information at Design Time
- Creating Parameters at Runtime