where to use ref cursor ?

please check for some related articles in the howto section of oracle.

Example

I have procedure to which the user can pass emp id or name of the employee and the output of the procedure is the salary of the given input

here there will be 2 different select statements one with empno in where clause and the other with name in where clause

here i will use the same ref cursor for both the select statements and i can pass the ref cursor as output variable .