I'm using OOo 2.4.1 on Windows Vista Home Premium, and I'm having
problems with some queries. I upgraded from v 2.3.1 on WinXP, where I
had done a database reset at the beginning of the year (under v 2.2, I
think). That process involved copying a table from Writer into Base,
which gave me a problem I'd had before, with all text fields having
blanks added at the beginning and end (so that null fields became two
blanks). I used the SQL TRIM function to remove the blanks, and all
appeared fine. There's a particular field that is either empty or
contains a "date" (mm/dd only), starting empty and acquiring the date
later, that is critical to my process. In 2.2, my queries had an IS
EMPTY (SQL NULL) that worked fine. But when I upgraded to 2.3, I soon
found that there was a distinction between my imported records and new
ones when this field was empty. Apparently the trimmed field, although
not containing any characters or blanks, does not satisfy the IS EMPTY
condition. So I tried changing the condition to NOT LIKE '*/*' -- but
then new records, with a true NULL, were not found. To get both kinds of
records in the result set, I had to have separate criteria for IS EMPTY
and NOT LIKE '*/*' (awkward, but I lived with it).
Now, with 2.4.1, the GUI is having a great deal of trouble with these
queries (at least sometimes). It tells me the query is too complex to be
edited with the GUI, or if it shows it, the NOT LIKE vanishes from the
condition leaving only '*/*' -- not at all what I want! I never really
wanted that condition anyway, a simple IS EMPTY really ought to suffice.
If I edit the SQL, the query works OK.
What is going on here? Is there some magical SQL function that will make
all the trimmed fields that now have no content recognizable as empty?
They sure look empty to me! One possibility that occurred to me was to
copy the current table and append the data into an identically defined
new table, and see if the simpler version of the query worked. But it
didn't, so whatever the distinction between the two kinds of empty
fields is, it was preserved through the copy operation and the import
wizard. Sigh.
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