so, we're working on this application, and its backend is an Oracle database, as I've been harping on for a week or two now. Anyways, we're utilizing packages and parameter lists because, well, it's Oracle, and the folks that designed the thing want every single data access to be via a stored procedure.

I can live with it.

Well, I've been playing with things, and discovered a slight flaw in the .NET to Oracle relationship. If I pass an empty string or a string without any characters to it, I get an error back from Oracle.

So, basically, if I have a text field and I enter a just a space, and then trim the value from that text field as I set it as the value of the data parameter I will get a hard crash.

Same as if the user leaves a text field blank.

This is the exception being reported by .NET:

Parameter 'teacher': No size set for variable length data type: String.

Why it would not accept the empty string, or even assume a NULL value I'm not certain. So I tried to provide default values, and apparently the parameter is overriding the default value as I get the same error.

Anyways, what I'm having to do is add a space to the values from the text field and then trim that value before I use it in the stored procedure.

And it gets better.

I can't reassign a value to the parameters, because they're all IN parameters by default. I guess I could change them to IN/OUT but that's a lot of hassle. So I'm having to do the trims every time I use the variable in the stored procedure.

This is just so much easier in SQL Server...