MySQL Stored Procedure Programming

Editing an Existing Stored Program

There are two approaches to editing the text of existing stored programs. The easiest —though probably not the best—way to edit an existing stored program is to use the MySQL Query Browser to edit the stored program in place. By “in place,” we mean that you work directly with the copy of the stored program held in the database. A better way is to edit an external text file that contains the stored procedure code. We describe these approaches in the following subsections.

Editing a Program in Place

Editing a stored program in place is certainly easy, as shown in Figure 7-8. To edit an existing stored program in this way, you simply locate and select the stored program in the MySQL Query Browser’s Schemata browser, right-click, and select Edit Procedure (or Edit Function) from the context menu. The relevant stored program code is loaded from the database into the edit window where you can make your changes. Clicking the Execute button runs the modified script and replaces the stored program in the database.

Figure 7-8. Editing a stored program in place with the MySQL Query Browser

Maintaining Stored Programs in External Files

There are a number of reasons why you may not want to edit stored programs in place, as we did in Figure 7-8:

• When you retrieve the text for a stored program from the database (as Query Browser and other similar programs do), you ...