Parsing JSON in Oracle with attribute longer than 4000 - json

Question

I'm trying to parse JSON attribute with value longer than 4000 characters. This is my sample json:
[{
"id": "268edbb5d111",
"name": "Sample Product",
"status": "created",
"description": "this is sample product",
"productCharacteristic": [{
"name": "property_1",
"value": "abc",
"valueType": "String"
}, {
"name": "property_2",
"value": 123,
"valueType": "Number"
}, {
"name": "property_3",
"value": "2020-05-01T04:56:07.000+00:00",
"valueType": "Date"
}
]
}
]
and this is PL/SQL code:
FOR x IN (SELECT *
FROM json_table(l_response, '$[*]'
COLUMNS
id varchar2(255) PATH '$.id',
name varchar2(255) PATH '$.name',
description varchar2(255) PATH '$.description',
status varchar2(255) PATH '$.status',
productCharacteristic varchar2(4000) FORMAT JSON PATH '$.productCharacteristic'
)
) LOOP
-- do something
END LOOP;
The productCharacteristic attribute might be longer than 4000 but changing its datatype to VARCHAR2(32000) compiles the package with ORA-00910: specified length too long for its datatype and changing to CLOB returns ORA-40484: invalid data type for JSON_TABLE column. Is there maybe a way to pass the whole array of productCharacteristic as JSON and parse it inside of the loop?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Is there maybe a way to pass the whole array of productCharacteristic as JSON and parse it inside of the loop?
It might not be quite what you want, but you can get all the array elements flattened out with nested path:
FOR x IN (SELECT *
FROM json_table(l_response, '$[*]'
COLUMNS
id varchar2(255) PATH '$.id',
name varchar2(255) PATH '$.name',
description varchar2(255) PATH '$.description',
status varchar2(255) PATH '$.status',
nested path '$.productCharacteristic[*]'
COLUMNS (
product_name varchar2(255) PATH '$.name',
product_value varchar2(4000) PATH '$.value',
product_value_type varchar2(255) PATH '$.valueType'
)
)
) LOOP
-- do something
dbms_output.put_line(x.id || ' ' || x.product_name || ' ' || x.product_value);
END LOOP;
db<>fiddle