Re: Formatting Text Field - Form

On Monday 14 March 2005 10:43, Thomas W Ping wrote:
> > > [1]But this leads me to another question.  I've done some test
> > > editing of this Rekall memo field, in a form, in two records.  I've
> > > then looked at the underlying MySQL .MYD file, and those changes
> > > (both involved adding text) only appeared in one record.  The
> > > changes were retained in a Rekall view of those records/fields,
> > > even after shutting down and restarting Rekall, so it's not like
> > > this would be attributed to a buffer not being flushed.  I was
> > > looking at the .MYD file from the CLI, with less.  Why wouldn't the
> > > *all* the edits be visible in the raw MySQL file, as the edits for
> > > one of the two records was?
> >
> > I'd have thought that they'd be trivially visible. Have you tried the
>
> Me three, Mike.  :)
>
> > mysql command line client to have a look-see ?
>
> Sure -- that's the next thing I did, when they didn't appear in the
> .MYD.  MySQL CLI client showed the edits, yes.  But if they're not
> showing in the underlying .MYD, where the heck is it getting them?  I
> not only checked in the location in the .MYD where they'd logically
> appear (with the rest of that record's fields), but I did a search on
> the whole file.  How puzzling.
>
> Mike, while I have your ear, I have another small-but-aggravating issue
> I'd like to toss at you.  In this table *and* in a little totally
> separate test table I made just to look at this issue (in a separate
> test database), I have date fields (not date:time, just date) that are
> set up within MySQL to be null-okay.  If I edit the dates via a Rekall
> *form* (with those fields set up in Rekall/form to be null-okay, as
> well) they work fine.  But if I edit them in a Rekall *table* (where
> they're also set up as null-okay), once a date is saved, I can't
> *remove* it.  I get a "[field] is not a date/time" error.  It (the
> Rekall table) is okay with the field being blank originally, and it's
> okay if I've made it blank via the form.  But if there's a date there
> when I open the table, I can't remove that date from within table data
> mode.  Any ideas on *this*?

Ahha - a tar pit.

First off, there is a field setting "emptynull" that you can set in forms that 
converts empty strings to null as they are saved ... have you perchance set 
this is the form?

Generally, its a bit of a throny issue, when is an empty string not an empty 
string (when its null :) Interestingly, Oracle treats empty strings as null 
(which turns out to be a pain since you have to do stuff like "where myfield 
= 'mike' ..." but "where myfield is null ..." when you mean "where myfield = 
'' ....)

A rekall table view is actually just a form, abliet one that is constructed on 
the fly to match the table, so it might be appropriate to set "emptynull" on 
date (and time and date/time) fields automagically (and, maybe on numbers as 
well - for instance, somewhere around v7.x, postgres started barfing on 
attempts to insert empty strings as numbers, rather than coverting them to 
zero).

Does this sound like a good idea, if so it should be quite trivial to add???


-- 
Regards
Mike

http://www.rekallrevealed.org
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