8.21 Determining Collection Status

The p_generate_md5 parameter determines if the MD5 message digests are computed for each member of a collection. The collection status flag is set to FALSE immediately after you create a collection. If any operations are performed on the collection (such as add, update, truncate, and so on), this flag is set to TRUE.

You can reset this flag manually by calling RESET_COLLECTION_CHANGED.

Once this flag has been reset, you can determine if a collection has changed by calling COLLECTION_HAS_CHANGED.

When you add a new member to a collection, an MD5 message digest is computed against all 50 attributes and the CLOB attribute if the p_generated_md5 parameter is set to YES. You can access this value from the MD5_ORIGINAL column of the view APEX_COLLECTION. You can access the MD5 message digest for the current value of a specified collection member by using the function GET_MEMBER_MD5.