RE: Show nulls on display file?

Further background on this: The user asked for a new field to be added to our item info screen for tracking vendor commissions, so I added a 2 digit numeric field to the file and the screen.

Then when the user went to enter the commissions, she entered all the commissions that should be 0 first. Yes, she went through several records and entered zero into a field that she saw as blank. She expected then to see that 0 to be displayed, but of course it wasn't since I have it zero-suppressed. I explained to her how that works and that she wasn't really changing the value and offered to remove the zero suppress from the field. But when I told her that would display 0 in every field that was 'blank', she said that wasn't going to work either. Her question was 'How am I to know which items I haven't entered the commission for yet?'

So, yes, the user wants to distinguish between zero and blanks in the field. I thought maybe a null value would work, but sounds like I just need to convert it to character. I also briefly considered a secondary field - a Y/N flag saying the commission had been entered.

Thanks

Bob Cagle
IT Manager
Lynk

-----Original Message-----
From: MichaelQuigley@xxxxxxxxxx

Can you define the situations that could have a null? All I can think
of is a new record? Or perhaps a numeric field for date terminated
sort

of thing? In any event, it seems to me that knowing how that null
field

will be used might pretty well define how you handle it?

I do like the idea of a a mark, perhaps underline a null? It still
confuses me though. How will the user key a blank/null into a numeric
field?

I'm not clear, but I think the OP is not really looking for genuine null fields. It sounds like they just want to distinguish between actually having blanks or zeroes in the field. If so, edit codes should work.

If they're really after distinguishing true null values, I like how DBU does it. They condition the field to use column separators (and yellow) when the value is null.

Michael Quigley