Traversing Dense Associative Arrays

A dense associative array (indexed by integer) has no gaps between elements—every element between the first and last element is defined and has a value (which can be NULL). You can traverse a dense array with a statement, as in the following example.

When inserted in the executable part of the example in Populating Associative Arrays, after the code that populates the employees_jobs array, the statement in the following example prints the elements of the employees_jobs array in the order in which they were stored. Their storage order was determined by the ORDER BY clause in the declaration of employees_jobs_cursor, which was used to declare employees_jobs (see the example in Declaring Associative Arrays).

The upper bound of the statement, employees_jobs. COUNT, invokes a collection method that returns the number of elements in the array. For more information about COUNT, see Oracle Database PL/SQL Language Reference.

Traversing a Dense Associative Array

-- Code that populates employees_jobs must precede this code:

FOR i IN 1..employees_jobs.COUNT LOOP
  DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(
    RPAD(employees_jobs(i).first_name, 23) ||
    RPAD(employees_jobs(i).last_name,  28) ||     employees_jobs(i).job_id);
  END LOOP;

Result:

William                Gietz                       AC_ACCOUNT
Shelley                Higgins                     AC_MGR
Jennifer               Whalen                      AD_ASST
Steven                 King                        AD_PRES
Lex                    De Haan                     AD_VP
Neena                  Kochhar                     AD_VP
John                   Chen                        FI_ACCOUNT
...
Jose Manuel            Urman                       FI_ACCOUNT
Nancy                  Greenberg                   FI_MGR
Susan                  Mavris                      HR_REP
David                  Austin                      IT_PROG
...
Valli                  Pataballa                   IT_PROG
Michael                Hartstein                   MK_MAN
Pat                    Fay                         MK_REP
Hermann                Baer                        PR_REP
Shelli                 Baida                       PU_CLERK
...
Sigal                  Tobias                      PU_CLERK
Den                    Raphaely                    PU_MAN
Gerald                 Cambrault                   SA_MAN
...
Eleni                  Zlotkey                     SA_MAN
Ellen                  Abel                        SA_REP
...
Clara                  Vishney                     SA_REP
Sarah                  Bell                        SH_CLERK
...
Peter                  Vargas                      ST_CLERK
Adam                   Fripp                       ST_MAN
...
Matthew                Weiss                       ST_MAN

Traversing Dense Associative Arrays

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