Hi Tom,

I'm trying to get the count of rows put into the ref cursor before the ref cursor is passed back to an ADO record set. I know that If i fetch out of the ref cursor I can use the cursor%ROWCOUNT. But this empties the ref cursor and I can not pass it back. I tried using a function on one of the fields and incrementing a global variable. On the first exec the global variable is zero and the records returned in the ref cursor totaled 2. The next exec the global variable goes to 2 and the records returned in the ref cursor totaled 2. The next exec the global variable was 4. I did not look at the ref cursor cause I knew it had 2 records. The next exec the global variable was still 4 I looked in the ref cursor, 2 records. Next exec the global variable went up to 6. It looks like the global variable only gets incremented when I look at the record set. So does that mean that the select is not executed until the ref cursor is looked at? I thought that the select was executed at the time the procedure was invoked and the information was placed into a memory location and the ref cursor returned the memory address to that location... So I'm confused about how the Ref cursor works and how to count tht number of records in it... Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Tess Goodwin