PL/SQL and Ada flow charts

Supported languages

Visustin generates flow charts for PL/SQL and Ada code. The syntax of these languages is quite similar and they are thus both described here.

The PL/SQL support has been built according to Oracle PL/SQL User's Guide and Reference 9.2 and verified for Oracle 10g.

The Ada support is built according to Ada 95 (ISO/IEC standard 8652:1995). It is our understanding that it also works with Ada 83 but we have not verified it. If you require Ada 83 support, please experiment with the demo and report any findings to us. If the same code would run differently on Ada 83 and 95, Visustin assumes it is Ada 95.

Supported PL/SQL and Ada statements

if..elsif..else
case..when
begin..end
exception..when
loop, for..loop, while..loop
exit, exit..when
raise
goto
null
return
select (Ada parallel execution)
accept (Ada)
forall (PL/SQL)
<< label >> and label:
comments
pragma (shown as comment)

Other statements are supported as well but they are handled as simple statements with no control flow effect. For example, a PL/SQL SELECT and an Ada delay are displayed "as is", as a single statement.

Procedures

The following procedural units are visualized:

Ada procedure, function, task body, entry.
PL/SQL procedure, function, trigger, package body.

Both languages support multi-procedure visualization. By pasting several procedures you can visualize them all. Notice that the PL/SQL CREATE PROCEDURE|FUNCTION|TRIGGER statements are visualized independent of the control flow they are part of. Thus, PL/SQL code that creates several procedures (functions, triggers) does not look like a single control flow but like several procedures.

Limitations

All statements must be terminated by a semicolon (;), otherwise the visualization goes out of sync. If in trouble, try pasting only the code between BEGIN..END;
The inner structure of SQL statements such as SELECT, UPDATE and INSERT is not visualized. These statements contain no explicit control flow, which is a typical feature and benefit of SQL.