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

[Irv Kalb]

Thanks Bart, but I don't understand how to do either of your suggestions.

To create a table, I parse through a list of fields and use the 
following to create each string field:

         oField = oTable.createStringField(sFieldName, iLength, lFlags)

the value of lFlags is either the empty list [] or if this field is 
intended to be indexed, then it will have the value of [#fIndexed].

I see that there is this additional flag type called #fNullable, but 
it looks like I want the opposite of #fNullable, which I would assume 
would be the default - the empty string.

How do I set a default value using createStringField and/or ImportText?



The documentation for ImportText contains this comment:

f the cursor represents a subset of the table-fields, then the 
omitted fields will be filled with
NULL values if the field in NULLABLE or blank values otherwise.

I assume that this is supposed to say:

f the cursor represents a subset of the table-fields, then the 
omitted fields will be filled with
NULL values if the field is NULLABLE or blank values otherwise.

But that's not what I am seeing.  I am seeing empty text fields set to VOID.

Confused ...

Irv


At 7:27 PM +0200 9/23/08, Bart Pietercil wrote:
>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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