Mostly Making oracle easy, mostly:
Search for:
ThatJeffSmith
In SQL Developer

How to Open your PL/SQL Objects…With the Keyboard in SQL Developer

1 Min Read

I have some code…

BEGIN
 give_raises();
END;
/

I can guess that GIVE_RAISES is a procedure of some kind. But now I want to open it, or ‘go to it’ or ‘step into it.’

And I want to do so without having to pick up my mouse.

So I could tell you about the Ctrl+Click trick, but that’s all mouse.

So what’s a child of the 80’s to do?

Define a keyboard shortcut for ‘Open Declaration’ and then use that.

Ctrl+Mouse Click versus using the keyboard to open my procedure.

It’s not JUST for PL/SQL

Yup, it works for TABLES too!

Note that I have two Document Tab Groups going, that’s why you can see my SQL Worksheet and the EMPLOYEES table side-by-side.

Keyboard Shortcuts

We don’t have enough keys to assign EVERYTHING a keyboard shortcut. Open Declaration was one of them. So, decide what makes sense for you. For me, it was ALT+I (I = Inspect.)

Everything You Need to Know about Keyboard Shortcuts PLUS A Cheat Sheet!

thatjeffsmith
Author

I'm a Distinguished Product Manager at Oracle. My mission is to help you and your company be more efficient with our database tools.

Related Posts

9 Comments

  1. Avatar
    Yogesh Reply

    Excellent . This is something many functional folks asked me about.

  2. Avatar
    Daniel Castillo Reply

    How can I do this but with functions and stored procedures defined inside a package?

    • thatjeffsmith
      thatjeffsmith Post Author

      The exact same way.

      So if I have

       
BEGIN
 customer_data.get_customer(id=>i/*varchar2*/,name=>n/*varchar2*/,regno=>r/*varchar2*/,language=>l/*varchar2*/
 );
 END;
 /

      And i put my cursor on the get_customer text, when it opens the Package, the focus will be on the declaration for the get_customer procedure.

    • Avatar
      Daniel Castillo

      Thank you very much.

      When I Ctrl+Click a function defined inside the same package it works perfectly but when I Ctrl+Click a function that is defined in another package, the focus ends in the package header and not in the package body.

    • thatjeffsmith
      thatjeffsmith Post Author

      Yes, it’s supposed to go to the spec. Once you’re in the spec you can easily toggle to the body though.

    • Avatar
      Daniel Castillo

      Excellent! and again thank you very much.

  3. Avatar
    Geraldo Viana Reply

    Hi. Thanks for the great SQL Developer Tool. The F5 shortcut(run script) in worksheet is OK and handy. But almost in every session I hit the F5 in the script output pane and the worksheet is emptied. Can your team fix these please.

    • thatjeffsmith
      thatjeffsmith Post Author

      The script output is emptied or the editor itself is cleared?

      Neither should be happening, and I don’t see that happening. What version do you have? Can you post the exact series of steps you are doing to see that behavior?

Write A Comment