Introduction

OCILIB++ is a C++ API for Oracle built on top of the C OCILIB API:

Full C API ported to C++
Implemented as a small set of header files, no library compilation needed
Based on C++ and STL paradigms (Strong typing, templates, containers, RAII, exception handling, operators, stack objects)
Based on design patterns (RAII, delegation, reference counting, smart pointers, proxies, singleton)
No user dynamic object allocation required
The only dependences are : STL and OCILIB C API

C++ language requirements

The OCILIB C++ API requires only C++03 features.
There are no dependencies on recent C++11 norm or C++14 draft.

Reference counting model

API usage is very simple, based on stack objects wrapping OCILIB handles using reference counting.
OCILIB handles are automatically allocated internally by C++ objects constructors or methods.
They are also automatically freed when the last C++ object referencing it goes out of scope.
Dynamic memory allocation is not required at all.
OCILIB++ allows simple and safe usage of Oracle client without the worries of memory leakages.
Using stack objects also makes error handling easier and program logic more robust

C++ API classes usage

Most C++ API classes wrap C API handles. When instances are created using the default constructors, they hold no C handles and have their method IsNull() returning true. Any use of other methods and functions on such object methods will throw an C++ exception. Thus, in order to have a valid object :

use a parametrized constructor
use the default constructor and then later assign a value to the instance using assignment operator. In the later case, the value can be provided by a function return value or using the object class constructor

Exception model

Any failure occurring within an OCILIB C API call will throw a ocilib::Exception
For conformance reasons, this class derives from std::Exception

Warning

OCILIB++ wraps the whole OCILIB C API.
Each C OCILIB object handle has its C++ class counter part.
The whole OCILIB C Documentation (concepts, use cases, features and functionalities) is still valid for OCILIB++