At 10:26 PM 7/01/2005 +0000, you wrote:

>Hi people,
>
>Let's say I have domains defined as:
>
>CREATE DOMAIN VC16 AS VARCHAR(16)
>CREATE DOMAIN MYDATE AS DATE
>
>Is there a way that I can do something like this?
>
>CREATE PROCEDURE SP_TMP (
> pFIRST_DATE MYDATE,
> pLAST_DATE MYDATE
>)
>AS
> DECLARE VARIABLE NAME VC16;
> DECLARE VARIABLE LASTNAME VC16;
> BEGIN
> ..

No.

>When I try do create a stored procedure like this, Firebird says it
>doesn't know anything about MYDATE and VC16. And when I create a
>stored procedure by typing the full field definitions, it creates new
>domains as RDB$4269, RDB$4270, RDB$4271 and so on.. As you see I have
>already many domains so wouldn't it be nice if I could reduce some?
>(I have 162 tables, 151 procedures, 90 users, 3.5gb firebird file)

User-defined domains currently are available only for defining columns in
tables.

Domain definitions can be changed. When that happens, the engine makes the
required changes to any table column defs that use the domain. Currently,
there is no mechanism by which the engine could somehow crawl inside a
compiled stored procedure or trigger and validate or update the object code
when a domain is changed. SP and trigger objects are also subject to some
strong existence restrictions once they have been invoked in a session.

The idea of making it so that domain definitions are available for PSQL
variables is discussed often and is likely to be supported in a future
major version of Firebird. It's not something that can be done
arbitrarily, since it requires a lot of re-architecting under the hood.

./hb