Re: Show nulls on display file?

On 2/22/2017 11:12 AM, Bob Cagle wrote:

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.

You might be able to do that with CHANGE if the input is not a subfile,
or with REACD + SFLNXTCHG for subfiles. Use that 'something has
changed' state to set a hidden field / indicator / change date that can
be used to RI, CS, UL, or otherwise visually indicate the difference
between a 'changed' row and an 'unchanged' row.