[Babase] Re: Hook's female question

Catherine Markham amarkham at princeton.edu
Wed May 9 14:22:11 EDT 2007


Hi all,

I thought I'd chime in with a note about what was discussed regarding 
the blanks vs. zeros in the bstatus field when I was one of the database 
managers.  Not sure how much it'll help, but here's what I have...

First, the following are links to when the topic was brought up on the 
Babase Listserv in April 2005 (the first is a stand alone message, the 
rest are threads off a single message):

http://www.eco.princeton.edu/pipermail/babase/2005-April/000501.html
http://www.eco.princeton.edu/pipermail/babase/2005-April/000505.html
http://www.eco.princeton.edu/pipermail/babase/2005-April/000506.html
http://www.eco.princeton.edu/pipermail/babase/2005-April/000507.html
http://www.eco.princeton.edu/pipermail/babase/2005-April/000508.html
http://www.eco.princeton.edu/pipermail/babase/2005-April/000509.html
http://www.eco.princeton.edu/pipermail/babase/2005-April/000510.html

As follow-up, I think Jeanne and I worked through the Excel file 
mentioned in the emails, and found that some of the bstatus values were 
more easily verified/corrected than others.  We made the first pass and 
I updated the system with the changes.  This still left some outstanding 
blanks vs. zeros that were not dealt with but were documented (all could 
actually be re-queried in FoxPro now as well).

I can't remember where the files were saved on the Altmann computer, so 
I just simply emailed Tabby some files that should (hopefully!) be 
helpful in sorting things out.

Hope that doesn't make things more confusing!

Catherine



Karl O. Pinc wrote:
> 
> On 05/09/2007 09:35:09 AM, kfenn wrote:
>> If Scott is using the online system, Tatu does have a bstatus of 0.  
>> She has no bstatus is the Babase1.0 (FoxPro ).  In fact, there are a 
>> number of empty bstatus values in Babase 1.0 but there are no empty 
>> (null) bstatus values in Babase 2.0.  As I recall, all empty fields in 
>> FoxPro are interpreted to be 0 value so they probably converted to 
>> real 0's rather than converting to Null values in Babase 2.0.
> 
> Yes.  Foxpro can't tell the difference and so they convert to the
> same value.
> 
>> Jeanne, Susan, were these empty values entered in Babase 1.0 with the 
>> intention of indicating 'Null' (no information at all?), or did you 
>> want bstatus to never be Null?
> 
> IIRC the data entry on the foxpro side, with respect to all "blank"
> vs 0 values in all columns, did not consistently use either 0 or
> the blank space.
> 
> (I don't think there's a good reason to allow Bstatus to be NULL.
> If you need another BSTATUSES that means "dunno" then make one
> and use that code.)
> 
> Karl <kop at meme.com>
> Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
>                  -- Robert A. Heinlein
> 
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