ARGCOUNT

Within an OLAP DML program, the ARGCOUNT function returns the number of arguments that were specified when the current program was invoked.

Return Value

INTEGER

Syntax

ARGCOUNT

Notes

Argument Declarations

Arguments can be either declared with an ARGUMENT statement or referenced with the ARG function.

Argument Requirements

When a program is invoked as a command -- that is, without parentheses around the arguments -- Oracle OLAP counts each word and punctuation mark on the command line as a separate argument. Therefore, you should not include arithmetic expressions, functions, qualified data references, or IF...THEN...ELSE... statements as arguments.

When you want to include any of these types of expressions as arguments in a program that will be invoked as a command, use PARSE in the program. Alternatively, you can enclose the arguments within parentheses and invoke the program either as a user-defined function or with CALL. When the program is invoked with CALL, the return value is discarded.

CALLTYPE Function

You can use CALLTYPE to determine whether a program was invoked as a function, as a command, or by using CALL.

Examples

Example 8-4 Checking the Number of Arguments

In the following example, the program, a user-defined function, verifies that three arguments are passed. When the number of arguments passed is not equal to 3, the program terminates with -1 as a return value.

DEFINE threearg PROGRAM INTEGER
LD User-defined function expecting three arguments
PROGRAM
ARGUMENT division TEXT
ARGUMENT product TEXT
ARGUMENT month MONTH
IF ARGCOUNT NE 3
   THEN RETURN -1
    ELSE
     DO
     ...