" I like to SET NUL ' ' (quote-space-quote) to make forms and reports look prettier"
Fred, in reports, if you right click on any column/variable and select "Null Format" you can enter what you want to display when null characters are found. Sometimes I use 'N.A.' to indicate that data is not available or to display a blank, simply use ' ' (quote-space-quote); no need to mess with the NULL setting. Javier, Javier Valencia 913-315-3137 ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Fred C Kopp Sent: Monday, March 31, 2008 4:36 PM To: RBASE-L Mailing List Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: How do I make NULL truly NULL? I know that plenty has already been said about this subject. but it's near and dear to my heart. I like to SET NUL ' ' (quote-space-quote) to make forms and reports look prettier. In 2.11 spaces would often somehow get recorded as data. They would look like nulls but they were actually invisible data. Therefore they would throw off searches that asked for records where the field was null or not null. I pulled my hair out for a while, then wrote some lines into RBASE.DAT to clean it all up at startup: SET NUL -0- UPDATE tablename SET colname = NULL WHERE colname = ' ' (quote-space-quote) I think the best advice is from Dennis. Keep it -0- except for forms and reports. You can set it and reset it with EEPs. But you can still get into trouble when you're editing a one- or two-character field with the null set at three characters. Don't ever try to enter -0-. Use Edit | Delete Value instead. I always test before I commit. It's a continuing issue that will eventually consume what hair I have left. Fred
