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Overview

EC_EXECUTION_UTILS is an Oracle E-Business Suite PL/SQL utility package owned by the APPS schema. It belongs to the E-Commerce Gateway (EC) module, which handles the inbound and outbound exchange of electronic business documents between Oracle EBS and external trading partners. The package provides generic infrastructure for dynamically describing, mapping, and executing stored procedures and functions that have been registered against transaction staging data. Its central purpose is to allow the E-Commerce Gateway to drive custom processing logic through metadata rather than hard-coded calls, resolving procedure signatures at runtime and binding interface columns to procedure parameters.

The package is declared with AUTHID CURRENT_USER, meaning its SQL statements execute with the privileges of the invoking user rather than the definer. The source header identifies it as ECXUTILS.pls, an original porting-era file that has remained stable across 12.1.1 and 12.2.2. It is a low-level engine used internally by the gateway and is referenced by three other packages in the ETRM repository.

Two user-defined record types and two associative array types underpin the design. The t_parameter and t_procparameters types model a parameter stack; t_procedures and t_proclist model the list of procedures to be executed, including cursor handles and execution clauses; and t_procmapping and t_procedure_mappings represent the association between staging variables and procedure parameters. The package draws on DBMS_DESCRIBE, DBMS_SQL, DBMS_UTILITY, and PLITBLM to perform dynamic SQL and signature introspection.

Key Procedures and Functions

• RUNPROC — Executes a given stored procedure or function by name. It resolves the callable through dynamic SQL, relying on the parameter stack prepared by the other routines to supply argument values and types.
• ASSIGN_VALUES — Populates the parameter stack for a procedure associated with a specific transaction staging record and action type. It determines which mapped variables supply values for each parameter of the target routine.
• LOAD_MAPPINGS — Loads the procedure-to-variable mappings for a given transaction type and map identifier. This is the routine that a user searching for "load_mappings" is looking for: it reads the gateway's mapping metadata and builds the in-memory t_procedure_mappings collection used by ASSIGN_VALUES and RUNPROC.

Tables Accessed

The package reads the E-Commerce Gateway configuration and interface tables through APPS synonyms:

• ECE_PROCEDURE_MAPPINGS — the core mapping catalog, supplying parameter names, variable names, and action/variable-level attributes.
• ECE_TRAN_STAGE_DATA — holds transaction staging rows and the custom procedure name associated with each stage.
• ECE_COLUMN_RULES, ECE_EXTERNAL_LEVELS, ECE_LEVEL_MATRICES — define column transformation rules and the level hierarchy used to determine which data elements apply to a mapped parameter.
• ECE_INTERFACE_TABLES and ECE_INTERFACE_COLUMNS — describe the interface table and column structure that the mappings ultimately reference.
• DBMS_DESCRIBE, DBMS_SQL, DBMS_UTILITY, PLITBLM — Oracle-supplied packages used for signature inspection and dynamic execution rather than application data.

Usage Notes

EC_EXECUTION_UTILS is not typically invoked directly from a form or concurrent program. It is a runtime support package called by E-Commerce Gateway processing logic, particularly the inbound transaction flows that apply custom procedures to staged data. The documented reference of three dependent packages confirms this internal role. Customizations that need to register and execute user-defined procedures against gateway transactions interact with this package indirectly, by maintaining rows in ECE_PROCEDURE_MAPPINGS and the associated interface metadata. The expected call sequence is LOAD_MAPPINGS, then ASSIGN_VALUES, then RUNPROC, allowing the gateway to resolve and invoke a mapped routine with values drawn from the transaction's staging variables. Because the package operates with AUTHID CURRENT_USER, callers must hold the necessary privileges on the referenced tables and on any invoked custom routines.