V10 Conditional Style - how to reference a empty date?

**Scholin** · 07-10-2009, 05:24 PM

Using the conditional styles in V10 with a grid field is amazing but I can not figure out how to reference a date field with a logical expression if it is empty (it displays "00/00/00" on my screen).

I am not sure if I am dealing with xbasic, javascript or what but I have tried many different combinations.

Has anyone tried this yet and if so what is the proper syntax to use?

It has to be something like datefield={} but I don't know what to replace the {} with.

Thanks!

**Pat Bremkamp** · 07-10-2009, 08:25 PM

John,

If you are using dbf tables, then that 00/00/00 is actually a valid date, so it is not empty, it is just long ago. So, one solution is to look for dates less than 1900, or what ever is long enough ago.

If you are using SQL, then the date might actually be null, and you can use SQL functions to test for that.

Pat

**Jim Coltz** · 07-10-2009, 11:05 PM

Originally Posted by Scholin

Using the conditional styles in V10 with a grid field is amazing but I can not figure out how to reference a date field with a logical expression if it is empty (it displays "00/00/00" on my screen).

I am not sure if I am dealing with xbasic, javascript or what but I have tried many different combinations.

Has anyone tried this yet and if so what is the proper syntax to use?

It has to be something like datefield={} but I don't know what to replace the {} with.

Thanks!

datefield = {} is valid for testing for an empty date field in a dbf table. I'm assuming you have a date format set in the grid field's dispay format properties. If so and you don't want to see the blank records as 00/00/00 you can create a conditional style for the field with a logical test of datefield ={} and then set the font color to match the background color of the field. In essence making the text invisible.

I did try to suppress the display of the 00/00/00 for empty fields using the display format property but the format builder does not seem to allow an if/then type test.

**Scholin** · 07-11-2009, 12:01 PM

I am not sure my using SQL as the back end had affected this or not but what finally did work in this conditional expression was using:

datefield<"01/01/2000"

Thanks for your help!

**martinwcole** · 07-11-2009, 04:58 PM

dtos(datefield) > ""

**Scholin** · 07-11-2009, 06:33 PM

Martin,

At first when I saw your suggestion I thought that was a clever way to achieve what I was trying to do so I tried it.

Maybe because I am using SQL as the back end, but I got a script error when I tried. At least the datefield>"01/01/2000" does get the job done for what I am doing.

Thanks again!