Moving from Forms 10g to 11g

Remember that there is a new version PL/SQL engine taking care of calls to the database. I stumbled upon a strange error moving from 10g to 11g.

Now in 11g, the PL/SQL is more restricted in functions behaviour.

A function MUST return av value. So code that looked like this, roughly, in Forms 10g passed, but should not have passed. When run in a 11g environment there are strange behaviour of this new more robust view of a function. Some of these errors can be hard to find, but a &debug and/or

MESSAGE('Informative text');

does the trick.

Here is what passed earlier, but no longer during run-time. It compiles, but is giving strange errors in Forms 11g. Note that the solution is just to RETURN something in the THEN-clause.

FUNCTION MyFunc(i_personId) RETURN VARCHAR2 IS
  l_MyVariable VARCHAR2(80);

BEGIN
 IF some_expression 
   THEN NULL;
   ELSE
   /* Do something */
   RETURN('RESULT');
 END IF;

END;