What is the purpose of this package? - oracle

Question

I am new to Oracle PL/SQL. I have found this package and it is called from a trigger. I just cannot figure exactly what this simple looking package code is doing.
It is called from a trigger as below:
IF INSERTING THEN
i := STATE_PKG_OVERRIDE_CN.AffectedRows.COUNT+1;
STATE_PKG_OVERRIDE_CN.AffectedRows(i).IDU := :new.IDU;
STATE_PKG_OVERRIDE_CN.AffectedRows(i).cn := :new.cn;
This is the package. Can somebody please explain the basics of what is it doing? does it return a value? change a value? what is AffectedRows RIDARRAY or EMPTY ?
create or replace PACKAGE STATE_PKG_OVERRIDE_CN
AS
TYPE rowid_cn IS RECORD
(
idu dirxml.USR.IDU%TYPE,
cn dirxml.USR.CN%TYPE
);
TYPE RIDARRAY IS TABLE OF rowid_cn INDEX BY BINARY_INTEGER;
AffectedRows RIDARRAY;
EMPTY RIDARRAY;
END;
I have googled EMPTY but found nothing, i believe it is creating a table of type record. The trigger is passing in a value of cn or IDU am i am familiar with these two values. But what is the package doing? or returning ? im confused.
Cheers

Answer 1

This is a bespoke package belonging to your organisation. (That's why Google wasn't helpful for you.) We cannot tell you for sure what it does or how it's used. But we can guess.
The package has no procedures or functions, it just defines array variables of a bespoke type, which can be used by other program units such as triggers. The trigger you posted assigns values to the array AffectedRows. Presumably this trigger fires FOR EACH ROW. Likely there is another trigger on the same table firing AFTER STATEMENT which reads that array and does some processing, then assigns AffectedRows := EMPTY to reset the array.
The purpose of this infrastructure is to pass state across trigger actions. A common reason for doing this is work around a mutating table exception. They are risky because state cannot be guaranteed; for instance if a insert fails before the AFTER STATEMENT trigger fires the AffectedRows array is not re-initialised, so subsequent processing will be incorrect (or will fail).
Since 11g Oracle provides compound triggers which remove the need for this sort of package. Find out more.
To investigate further, first you want to check USER_TRIGGERS to find other triggers on the table which owns the trigger you mentioned. If that doesn't help or you want to see whether other tables also use this package run this query:
select *
from user_dependencies
where referenced_type = 'PACKAGE'
and referenced_name = 'STATE_PKG_OVERRIDE_CN'

Answer 2

It begins with the package which
declares a type ROWID_CN as a record that contains two values: IDU and CN
syntax requires to create another type (RIDARRAY) which is based on previously declared ROWID_CN
affectedrows and empty are arrays whose type is RIDARRAY. Basically, you can imagine them as a table that has two columns, IDU and CN
Now, a trigger: piece of code you posted says that those 3 lines are executed when someone inserts a row into a table the trigger is based on. For example,
create or replace trigger trg_biu_emp
before insert or update on emp
for each row
declare
i number;
begin
if inserting then ...
Apparently, there's some code that is executed when updating, or even deleting rows.
Anyway:
i := ... line counts number of elements in affectedrows array (which is declared in the package) and adds 1 to that number. For example, if there were 3 elements, i would be 4.
...affectedrows(i).idu := :new.idu enters a new row into the array. Its ordinal number is i (4 in our example). As you're inserting a row into the table, trigger knows IDU column's :new value and puts it into the array. For example, if you used
insert into emp (idu, cn) values (100, 'A')
then affectedrows(4).idu = 100, while affectedrows(4).cn = 'A'
It is, probably, something similar with EMPTY array. Google can't return anything useful, it is just a custom-made array.