O$: Null Fields

[Joe Maus]

----- Christine Penner <christine at ingenioussoftware.com> wrote:
> There is a couple of rows of data we hold in task 
> variables. Because they almost never change we 
> clear nulls out of them when they are loaded. 
> Everywhere else we are going to leave the nulls 
> because we don't want to take the extra time to 
> walk through anything to clear them (even if the 
> time is small). When are finding over 1000 
> records the time difference will be noticeable.

Thus a "translation" by the back end from null to "empty" might be just the solution you're looking to implement.  It will not add any significant time to do the translation there.  It would add time to do a "sendall()" once in Omnis though.

> 
> This is what I would do with my example. A lot of 
> code to check for changes in 2 fields. Anyone 
> have a better way knowing there could be nulls in the data?

Your only other option would be to create the function in the database and have it do the work before you go and save the data.  perhaps a trigger would work on the table.  But I suspect you're looking to do something in the application based on those column values (or lack thereof) so a DB call is probably a bit of overkill.

Regards,

Joe Maus