navitaging through ref in oracle

Question

I'm working with Oracle 11gR2, and i'm having doubts with objects which contains REFS. Watching the next picture:

And knowing that the that the table emp_ps is a table of emp_typ, i can't understand how the sentence in the picture is correct. Shouldn't be the ref fields unreachable through the "." operator? I thought that i had to deref the value of "e.dept" into an aux varibale of emp_typ, and then and only then I would be able to navigate through the fields of aux!

Answer 1

I think you only need DEREF to return the object as a whole. Documentation allows implicit dot-dereferencing, multi-level nested too.