One way to avoid the use of a zero in place of a null if you want or need fields to contain something is to use a negative number or something so ridiculous that you know it’s wrong: 99999999 for instance or its negative.
Regards, Alastair. From: A.G. IJntema Sent: Saturday, June 25, 2011 4:01 PM To: RBASE-L Mailing List Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: Issue with IFNULL and SET ZERO. Karen, I agree, but... A long ago I was told to avoid empty numeric fields (when I still did some programming in COBOL) . And I still like the idea behind it, because the results could be unpredictable and a null value could indicate that you have forgotten the field or variable. Looking at the problem which is described maybe another column should be added. The way it is solved right now the lower price will be applicable as soon as somebody hits the enter button after filling in the lower price. I don’t think this is an ideal situation I think adding a date – time column from when on the lower price will be applicable will improve the flexibility of the solution. Then you are in total control of the situation and you are able to set lower prices at any moment and they will not be applicable until the date –time moment has come. In that case even a 0 price is possible and you still can avoid null. Tony From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: vrijdag 24 juni 2011 0:41 To: RBASE-L Mailing List Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: Issue with IFNULL and SET ZERO. I wouldn't agree with that, Tony. A $0 price is not the same as a null. A null in the field means (I assume) that they have no idea yet what the price is. And according to Larry a $0 is a valid price. Karen In a message dated 6/23/2011 5:32:26 PM Central Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: My suggestion would be to avoid the null value by setting the default value to 0 . I assume the lowprice never will be really 0.00 (for free), Then you can avoid the complicated if-statement Tony
