Informix Error -657

Reasons / Common Causes

-657 fires when a CREATE PROCEDURE (or CREATE FUNCTION) statement appears inside the body of another CREATE PROCEDURE statement — per the official guidance, SPL routines can't be nested this way.

1. A CREATE PROCEDURE/CREATE FUNCTION statement written inside another routine's body, per the official guidance — the direct, only cause.
2. A misunderstanding of SPL routine scoping, expecting nested routine definitions to work the way local function definitions do in some general-purpose programming languages.

Solutions / Resolution

1. Define the two routines as separate, top-level CREATE PROCEDURE/CREATE FUNCTION statements, rather than nesting one inside the other.
2. Have the outer routine call the other routine by name, using EXECUTE PROCEDURE/EXECUTE FUNCTION or a direct function call, once both are defined separately.

Examples

The disallowed attempt

CREATE PROCEDURE outer_proc()
  CREATE PROCEDURE inner_proc()
    ...
  END PROCEDURE;
  -- -657: CREATE PROCEDURE can't appear inside another CREATE PROCEDURE
END PROCEDURE;

Corrected — two separate top-level routines

CREATE PROCEDURE inner_proc()
  ...
END PROCEDURE;

CREATE PROCEDURE outer_proc()
  EXECUTE PROCEDURE inner_proc();
END PROCEDURE;

Diagnostic Checks

1. Scan the routine body for a CREATE PROCEDURE/CREATE FUNCTION statement, and pull it out to a separate, top-level definition.

Related Errors / Related Topics

No closely related error codes are cross-referenced for -657 in this set yet.

SPL routines can't be nested — define both routines separately at the top level, and have one call the other by name.