ERRBUFF and RETCODE : PL/Sql Mandatory Parameters for Concurrent Programs

In Oracle EBS, we can use Concurrent Programs to call a procedure within a package. Every PL/SQL procedure of packages which is being called in a concurrent program must have two mandatory OUT parameters – ERRBUFF and RETCODE

ERRBUF : is used to get error messages.We can capture any error in exception block by assigning the error message to this parameter. 
Once the concurrent program completed click details button and we can see the error message captured by errbuf.
RETCODE: is used to get the status of the concurrent program. It can take any of the following values

0 – Concurrent Program is successful.-Completed
1 – Concurrent program completed with warning.-- Yellow color
2 – Concurrent Program has some Error.-- Red

Why Do we Have This
Different business have different needs. These two mandatory parameters makes it flexible for the developers to end a concurrent program in error or warning as per their custom needs.

For eg : Lets say we have a procedure that computes salary of a person. A negative salary is an error scenario for the business but not for oracle. As a result concurrent program will end up in success on completion of request. But using RETCODE we can make the concurrent program to end in error by setting its value to 2 and in the similar way we can add our custom error message to the ERRBUF parameter.

Sample Procedure Declaration

CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE XX_CUSTOM_PKG PROCEDURE validate_salary (X_ERRBUF OUT VARCHAR2, X_RETCODE OUT NUMBER, P_USER_ID IN NUMBER); BEGIN . . . EXCEPTION WHEN NEGATIVE_SALARY THEN X_ERRBUF : 'Negative salary computed. Incorrect data'; X_RETCODE = 2; END;