OK Ted - here's what I did - and what assumptions I am making. As mentioned in my previous reply - I tested making the change from a numeric field of 17,2 to 18,2 - and that seems to have fixed the problem!
My assumption? My guess is that by enabling NULL for a field - that it actually has to use a character of that field to store extra info about the NULL usage. So - by making the field a total length of 18 instead of the prior length of 17 - I get back that character that I lost to the NULL data implementation.
Does that make sense? Logical sense??
Regards, Kurt Wendt Senior Systems Analyst
Tel. +1-212-747-9100 www.GlobeTax.com
-----Original Message----- From: ProfoxTech [mailto:profoxtech-bounces@leafe.com] On Behalf Of Ted Roche Sent: Monday, August 15, 2016 3:07 PM To: profoxtech@leafe.com Subject: Re: Complications with NULLS
SDF? Woah, what a blast from the past!
Perhaps you need to transform the NULL data to actual blank blanks before exporting, something like:
SELECT field1, field2, NVL(field3,space(1)) as field3, field4 from mydata... COPY TO ... TYPE SDF
On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 1:45 PM, Kurt Wendt Kurt_Wendt@globetax.com wrote:
No - not true. Everything works - in as far as data is generated. It's just that the Text file is short by a blank in the one data column that contains a field that accepts the NULL values.
Text files are basically generated using: COPY TO ... TYPE SDF
I say basically because a data header type file is generated with the same COPY TO type command, and then low-level file handling is used to put the header and data into the same Txt file.
Regards, Kurt Wendt Senior Systems Analyst
Tel. +1-212-747-9100 www.GlobeTax.com
-----Original Message----- From: ProfoxTech [mailto:profoxtech-bounces@leafe.com] On Behalf Of Ted Roche Sent: Monday, August 15, 2016 12:21 PM To: profoxtech@leafe.com Subject: Re: Complications with NULLS
So, the changes you made to put NULLs in the data for the Excel files work for Excel, but don't work for the text generation? How do you generate the text files?
On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 11:58 AM, Kurt Wendt Kurt_Wendt@globetax.com wrote:
The VFP app gens the Txt file. It does the generation of the 2 files in sequence - and they can choose to generate or Not generate each file during the processing.
Regards, Kurt Wendt Senior Systems Analyst
Tel. +1-212-747-9100 www.GlobeTax.com
-----Original Message----- From: ProfoxTech [mailto:profoxtech-bounces@leafe.com] On Behalf Of Ted Roche Sent: Monday, August 15, 2016 11:54 AM To: profoxtech@leafe.com Subject: Re: Complications with NULLS
On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 11:48 AM, Kurt Wendt Kurt_Wendt@globetax.com wrote:
But, then they need to generate this Text file output - which gets sent to clients. Those Txt files are then imported into their systems. And, needless to say - the format of the Text files must stay consistent and MUST be properly formatted.
So - imagine my surprise to learn that the Text files were wrong.
Are "they" generating text files from the Excel output, or are they using the VFP app that generated the Excel files to do it?
[excessive quoting removed by server]