Avoiding a Double Cursor...

Another question about web apps built with the PL/SQL web cartridge. We
have procedures which display data from the db to the user in a table
format. We show the first 45 results, and if the user needs more, there
are links to other "page numbers" at the bottom of the table.

To properly limit our data, we need a count of all the records that are
going to be returned by the query.

Since we use weak reference cursors, the rowcount attribute (in Oracle
9i) only tells us which row we're currently on. So we loop through the
whole cursor one time, counting up all the rows. Then we close and
re-open the cursor, and start iterating through it, displaying rows to
the user.

Is there a better way to get the total results returned? I have tried
wrapping the query in a "SELECT COUNT (*) FROM ( << query goes here >>
)" and then executing immediate, but that does not seem to work either.

does anyone have suggestions?

Thanks

.