How to handle to_date exceptions in a SELECT statment to ignore those rows?
Echoing Tony's comment, you'd be far better off storing dates in DATE columns rather than forcing a front-end query tool to find and handle these exceptions.
If you're stuck with an incorrect data model, however, the simplest option in earlier versions is to create a function that does the conversion and handles the error,
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION my_to_date( p_date_str IN VARCHAR2,
p_format_mask IN VARCHAR2 )
RETURN DATE
IS
l_date DATE;
BEGIN
l_date := to_date( p_date_str, p_format_mask );
RETURN l_date;
EXCEPTION
WHEN others THEN
RETURN null;
END my_to_date;
Your query would then become
SELECT *
FROM myTable
WHERE my_to_date(myTable.sdate, 'MM/dd/yyyy') <= {?EndDate}
Of course, you'd most likely want a function-based index on the MY_TO_DATE
call in order to make this query reasonably efficient.
In 12.2, Oracle has added extensions to the to_date
and cast
functions to handle conversions that error
SELECT *
FROM myTable
WHERE to_date(myTable.sdate default null on conversion error, 'MM/dd/yyyy') <= {?EndDate}
You could also use the validate_conversion
function if you're looking for all the rows that are (or are not) valid dates.
SELECT *
FROM myTable
WHERE validate_conversion( myTable.sdate as date, 'MM/DD/YYYY' ) = 1
If your data is not consistent and dates stored as strings may not be valid then you have 3 options.
- Refactor your DB to make sure that the column stores a date datatype
- Handle the exception of string to date in a stored procedure
- Handle the exception of string to date in a (complex) record selection formula
I would suggest using the first option as your data should be consistent.
The second option will provide some flexibility and speed as the report will only fetch the rows that are needed.
The third option will force the report to fetch every record in the table and then have the report filter down the records.