Accessing Attributes:

You can refer to an attribute only by its name not by its position in the object type. To access or modify the value of an attribute, you can use the dot notation. In the illustration below, you assign the value of the attribute den to variable denominator. Then, you can assign the value stored in the variable numerator to attribute the num.

DECLARE

r Rational := Rational(NULL, NULL);

numerator INTEGER;

denominator INTEGER;

BEGIN

...

denominator := r.den;

r.num := numerator;

The Attribute names can be chained, that allows you to access the attributes of the nested object type. For illustration, assume that you define the object types Address and Student, as shown below:

CREATE TYPE Address AS OBJECT (

street VARCHAR2(30),

city VARCHAR2(20),

state CHAR(2),

zip_code VARCHAR2(5)

);

CREATE TYPE Student AS OBJECT (

name VARCHAR2(20),

home_address Address,

phone_number VARCHAR2(10),

status VARCAHR2(10),

advisor_name VARCHAR2(20),

...

);'

Note that that zip_code is an attribute of the object type Address and that Address is the datatype of the attribute home_address in object type Student. If s is a Student object, you can access the value of its zip_code attribute as shown below:

s.home_address.zip_code