Oracle Forms Developer – Form Builder Reference, Volume 1

Cursor Mode property
Note:
In Release 5.0 and later, cursor mode is handled automatically by Form Builder. This property is
now obsolete, and should not be used. In particular, cursor mode should never be set to Close. The
following information is provided only for historical and maintenance purposes.
Description
Defines the cursor state across transactions. The cursor refers to the memory work area in which SQL
statements are executed. For more information on cursors, refer to the ORACLE RDBMS Database
Administrator’s Guide. This property is useful for applications running against a non-ORACLE data
source.
The following settings are valid for the Cursor_Mode property:
Setting Description
Open (the default) Specifies that cursors should remain open across
transactions.
Close Specifies that cursors should be closed when a commit
is issued.
Applies to form
Set programmatically
Refer to Built-in
• GET_FORM_PROPERTY
• SET_FORM_PROPERTY
Default
OPEN_AT_COMMIT
Usage Notes
• Because ORACLE allows the database state to be maintained across transactions, Form Builder
allows cursors to remain open across COMMIT operations. This reduces overhead for subsequent
execution of the same SQL statement because the cursor does not need to be re-opened and the SQL
statement does not always need to be re-parsed.
• Some non-ORACLE databases do not allow database state to be maintained across transactions.
Therefore, you can specify the CLOSE_AT_COMMIT parameter of the Cursor_Mode option to
satisfy those requirements.
• Closing cursors at commit time and re-opening them at execute time can degrade performance in
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