[V4MD] Empty field returns <void>, can it return ""?

[Bart Pietercil]

Hi Irv,

just a suggestion, what happens when you set this fields to have a  
default value and specify nothing in the value ?

of course you could always do update t1 set f1 = "" where f1 is null

hth

Bart

On 23 Sep 2008, at 19:18, Irv Kalb wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've got a new one today.  I hope I'm not using up my quota of help
> here :)  (I really do appreciate the quick responses here.)
>
> My customer creates their tables in Excel and exports them to tab
> delimited files.  In some of their records, they have no entry for
> one or more fields.  For example, they may have a record with fields
> (all are 'string' fields):
>
>   A  B  C  D  E
>
> And a record may look like:
>
> ValueOfA<tab>ValueOfB<tab>ValueOfC<tab><tab>ValueOfE
>
> In this record, there is no value for D.  When I try to get this
> record in my application, I get a list back like this:
>
> ["ValueOfA", "ValueOfB", "ValueOfC", <Void>, "ValueOfE"]
>
> Which seems perfectly reasonable.   However, I am converting code
> from V12 to Valentina, and in the same situation, V12 returned a list
> like this:
>
> ["ValueOfA", "ValueOfB", "ValueOfC", "", "ValueOfE"]
>
> So the value I got for D from V12 was an empty string and there is
> code throughout my application that checks for this empty string.
> There are many many places where such empty fields are allowed, and
> in all cases, my code checks for the empty string to know that there
> was no value entered.
>
> Question:  Is there any quick way to either build the database so
> that empty fields are translated the empty string (""), or when
> retrieving data from the database, that <void> values could be
> converted to the empty string("")?   If not, I'll either write my
> own, or change a bunch of code.
>
> My utility to create the database uses the following key line for
> building each table:
>
>   curs.ImportText(sFileName, TAB, RETURN, "UTF-8", TRUE)  -- I also
> tried "" for the encoding with no difference
>
> The documentation talks about a #fNullable flag type for fields, but
> it looks like is an option and not the default.  That is, I would
> only expect them to be set to VOID if the #fNullable attribute was
> turned on.  From what I read, I would expect all string fields to
> default to an empty string, but this is not what I am seeing.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Irv
>
> -- 
>
> Multimedia R Us
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