TAPI vs. XAPI
I just wanted to bring attention to some very interesting discussion (that’s been going on for years now) regarding Table APIs (TAPI) versus Transactional APIs (XAPI). Some very nice answers, as well as a bit of controversy 🙂
I just wanted to bring attention to some very interesting discussion (that’s been going on for years now) regarding Table APIs (TAPI) versus Transactional APIs (XAPI). Some very nice answers, as well as a bit of controversy 🙂
John Flack
23 June 2010 - 10:53 pm
Thanks for the link to APC’s article in Stackoverflow. I hadn’t seen that before – APC is always good reading. I’ve used TAPIs – when you use Oracle Designer’s Web PL/SQL generator you have to have Designer generate TAPIs too. I like the interfaces to Designer’s TAPIs because they use PL/SQL records rather than one parameter per table column, and have a record for indicator variables. This makes maintenance a whole lot easier: Add a column to the table? Just add it to the record definition – no need to find every place the TAPI is called.
I’ve also written XAPIs, and have especially liked using these to pass data for more than one table. Another way I’ve done this is with views and INSTEAD OF triggers. Nice thing about doing that is that some tools want to update tables or views, and don’t understand stored procedures.