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What’s Wrong With My Code? We Try to Help You

2 Mins Read

I see questions like this on StackOverflow and related websites like, ALL THE TIME:

I have some code, what’s wrong with it?

Something I wish I could do, other than physically hold the person’s hand, is show them how our IDE tries to point them in the right direction of their syntax issues. But since I can’t do that, I’ll write a quick blog post and help the Google gods can help folks going forward.

I borrowed this statement from an actual question.

SELECT
    easbwaredgs_t.id,
    easbwaredgs_t.fk_easbware_id,
    easbwaredgs_t.mandant,
    easbwaredgs_t.reg_code_mc,
    easbwaredgs_t.hazard_code_ident,
    easbwaredgs_t.add_hazard_code,
    easbwaredgs_t.haz_code_version,
    easbwaredgs_t.undg_number,
    easbwaredgs_t.ship_flashpoint,
    easbwaredgs_t.flashpoint_type,
    easbwaredgs_t.cont_dopc,
    easbwaredgs_t.cont_dop,
    easbwaredgs_t.cont_phone,
    easbwaredgs_t.verpack_grp_mc,
    easbwaredgs_t.ems_nr,
    easbwaredgs_t.trem_card_nr,
    easbwaredgs_t.secondimo,
    easbwaredgs_t.thirdimo,
       ( SELECT
    COUNT(*)
FROM
    easbwaredgs_t AS k
           LEFT OUTER JOIN easbdgstn_t AS p ON k.id = p.fk_easbwaredgsid
WHERE
    k.mandant = '001'
    AND k.fk_easbware_id = 1
    AND p.type_mc = 'TRANSPORT_DGS_LIM_QUANT'
       ) AS cc_is_limited_quantities
FROM
    easbwaredgs_t
WHERE
    easbwaredgs_t.mandant = '001'
    AND EASBWAREDGS_T.FK_EASBWARE_ID = 1

So, starting out from ‘scratch’, you might want some help with finding out where your problem is.

Sure, you could run the query and get the error line and cursor position, but generally our parser will identify problems AS YOU TYPE THEM.

It’s ‘all in the squiggle.’

The offending code is underline with a pink ‘squiggle’.

If you mouse over the underlined-text, we try to help you out with some doc links and expected ‘next’ words from the parser.

Can’t see the line? Let’s zoom in again.

Don’t like the color/style scheme? You can change that.

If you have a LOT of code, you don’t have to scan the editor looking for squiggles. You can pop open the Code outline. Any errors will be listed, and if you double-click on the items, they’ll take you to the offending line/curpos.

right-click in your worksheet or code editor and select ‘Code Outline’

And don’t forget, you can click on the ‘book’ to go straight to the online docs!

click on the ‘book’

A Bug Fix for 18.1

We used to show the errors/indicators in the sql worksheet gutters. So again, if you had hundreds of lines of code, you could zoom in and see what was what, where. That’s fixed AND enhanced for 18.1.

In the right-gutter, parser hints and errors are shown. You can mouse over to get a ‘zoom’ on the code.
Author

I'm a Distinguished Product Manager at Oracle. My mission is to help you and your company be more efficient with our database tools.

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4 Comments

  1. MP A. Fan Reply

    Thanks, Jeff, there were some features that I didn’t know about. And I realized I need to upgrade my software 🙂

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