Isn’t it nice when something just works?  We are building Ruby on Rails apps on top of Oracle, so we’re using the Oracle Enhanced ActiveRecord adapter on top of the ruby-oci8 driver library.

The ActiveRecord adapter gives us a nice AR wrapper around our existing Oracle schema, which is great, but what about when I want to work with stored procedures or functions?  Turns out the author of this adapter, Raimonds Simanovskis, has a gem just for this called ruby-plsql.

Include the gem in your Gemfile:

gem 'ruby-plsql'

Then, write an initializer that hooks it to your existing ActiveRecord connection (config/plsql.rb)

plsql.activerecord_class = ActiveRecord::Base

After that, calling procedure is easy.  Oracle return types are automatically cast to ruby types.  Oracle exceptions are raised as OciError, which contains a “code” and “sql” attribute.  However, you can call a “message” method on that exception to get the full error output.

Here I call an Oracle procedure, idcard.nd_is_valid_pin using the plsql object provided in the gem:

ok_pin = plsql.idcard.nd_is_valid_pin( new_pin )
  if ok_pin
    plsql.idcard.update_pin_pr( @info.ndid, params[:old_pin], pin )
  else
    raise Errors::InvalidInput
  end
rescue OCIError => e
 render json: { error: e.message }, status: :unprocessable_entity

That’s it!  Nice and easy, and “rsims” is two for two.