You are right, the debugger should cope. From what I've seen, it has trouble with both varrays and nested table collections.

I often see varrays used in PL/SQL when the more useful nested table type would be a better choice, and I just wondered if there was some reason for it.

yes, we use the varrays for table columns. and so far we didn't experience any problems with that.

any updates on this ?

No updates yet.

this post is 3 years old, and there a still no updates. i can't believe this

Well I think the debugger aught to be able to handle arrays.
It works perfectly well for an array which is a locally declared variable.
But if the array (of same type) is passed as parameter, the whole application freezes when you do "view collection variable". All you can do is shut it down then (just what you want when your debugging, eh?)
It doesn't seem to freeze on hover of the mouse any more (at least in my simple test case).
The least I would expect is the application to continue working. What i really want is of course, to be able to inspect a parameter array just like a locally declared one.
And what's really bad: if i assign the parameter array to the local one, it also hangs on inspection of the local array! So no easy workaround there.

Can Laurent Feltz test this with some reasonable size of array, like 50, 150, 1500, coz if this is related to error in PLSQLDev, then it would hang anyway, but what if PLSQLDev tries to get all those 2.14 milliard stuff from DB?
As I rememeber, PLSQLDev gets only first 1K recs from array, actually...
And myself, I never had a problem of that type - hanging with arrays, but I never use varrays, especially 2.14 miliard ones, nested tables is usually a way to go for me

As suggest by Kirurgs, I tried with a varray with a reasonable size, that is 10! I still have the same problem: pl/sql dev freezes.

I'm using now pl/sql dev. 7.1.1.1339
Oracle release is always 9.2.0.7 (as said in previous messages, it seems that this problem appears with Oracle 9.2.0.1).

Marco, please try to reproduce the problem: please use a database server 9.2.0.x and the following code:

CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE "AR_NUM_TEST" AS VARRAY(10) OF NUMBER;

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE test_varray ( par IN ar_num_test)
IS
BEGIN
IF
par IS NOT NULL
THEN
dbms_output.put_line('<NOT NULL>'); -- Breakpoint here -> PL/sql Dev freezes when I try to watch from here the parameter "par"
END IF;
RETURN;
END test_varray;


-- Test script
declare
-- Local variables here
lar ar_num_test := ar_num_test (1, 2, 3);
begin
test_varray (par => lar);
end;

[quote]Marco, please try to reproduce the problem: please use a database server 9.2.0.x and the following code[/quote]Sure, we'll check it out, and I will post our findings.

I tested this on 9.2.0.1, where it does indeed cause a hang-up, and on 10.2.0.1, where it works just fine. It looks like a 9.2.0.x specific bug.