Routine Overloading and Naming UDRs with a Routine Signature (IDS)

Because of routine overloading, the name of a user-defined routine does not need to be unique to the database. You can define more than one UDR with the same name, provided that the routine signature for each UDR is different.

UDRs are uniquely identified by their signatures. The signature of a UDR includes the following items of information:

• The type of routine (function or procedure)
• The identifier of the routine
• The cardinality, data type, and order of the parameters
• In an ANSI-compliant database, the owner name

For any given UDR, at least one item in the routine signature must be unique among all the UDRs registered in the database.

Specifying an Existing UDR

To reference an existing UDR by a name that does not uniquely identify the UDR, you must also specify the parameter data types after the UDR name, in the same order that they were declared when the UDR was created. Dynamic Server then uses routine resolution rules to identify the instance of the UDR to alter, drop, or execute. As an alternative, you can specify its specific name, if one was declared when the UDR was created. Specific names are described in the section Specific Name . For more details of routine resolution, see Comparing Arguments to the Parameter List, and IBM Informix User-Defined Routines and Data Types Developer's Guide.