Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Java API: setting array-type binding variables for a theme

MapViewer supports pre-defined themes that contain query conditions with one or more binding variables. For instance, we can define a theme COUNTIES_BY_STATES that displays all the counties whose State abbreviations are in a list supplied by user at run time.

The query condition for this theme may look like the following:

( state_abrv in (select column_value from table(:1)) )


In other words, when this theme is to be displayed, it will require a list of State abbreviations such as 'CA', 'WA', 'NY' as the value for its query's binding variable. Note that this binding variable itself requires a SQL TABLE type.

So how do you supply such an array of state abbreviation codes to the MapViewer from your Java application? The following shows the sample code that does just that.

String [] values = { "MA","NY","ME","NH" }; //list of state abbreviations
ArrayParameter states = new ArrayParameter("MV_STRINGLIST",values);
Object [] values = new Object[1]; //array containing all binding variable values
values[0] = states;
mapViewer.setThemeBindingParameters("COUNTIES_BY_STATES", values);

Note that basically you must use MapViewer's public ArrayParameter class to supply the list of states (or list of any strings/numbers) for a single table-type binding variable. Because in this case there is only one binding variable in this theme's query, the values array contains only one element, the ArrayParameter instance.

Note also MV_STRINGLIST is a SQL list/table type created by MapViewer automatically in each data source (database schema). Please check the 11g MapViewer user's guide on more information about this pre-created type.

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