Conditional compilation

[Cesare Zecca]

Hi all

I was attracted by a topic "Conditional compilation" in the Direct Oracle Access forum.
I was pleasantly surprised by the argument of that topic (conditional compilation). If I have understood well PL/SQL does not provide any preprocessing facility.

Is there any possibility that PL/SQL Developer did implement such a functionality as proprietary extension and that I, as novice, simply ignore it?

I'm working to a package for a basic version of design-by-contract in PL/SQL and I would be greatly interested to the possibility to remove/strip contract clauses from the production/release version of source code.

Thanks in advance for any suggestion.
Cesare

 

[Marco Kalter]

This is currently not possible, but we could indeed provide a proprietary conditional compilation directive. I have added this to the list of enhancement requests.

 

[Cesare Zecca]

Thanks, Marco
That would be great!
Provided that...
... provided that the preprocessing would be
handled consistently by the IDE as a first-class
step of the
write (- preprocess) - compile (- link) - debug
process.

The risk of "off-line" preprocessing is that
the produced, modified source code is almost always so tangled up that debugging (and fixing of found bugs) gets irksome.

Bye
Cesare

 

[Marco Kalter]

Processing the directive will be a step before compilation. The conditional code will either be present or not in the database. In the debugger, or more general, when viewing a source from the database, you will not see the excluded code.

 

[FrankMUC]

What do you think about supporting the new plsql_ccflags introduced in 10.2? (See: http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/05-sep/o55asktom.html "Conditional Compilation")
The 'Project Items' menu could be a good spot to define these options.
Regards Frank

 

[Marco Kalter]

We are looking at this. You can already use conditional compilation with the standard functionality that Oracle supplies of course. Having it built into the project is of course much easier.