Forum Discussion

AndreonnaGarret's avatar
AndreonnaGarret
Qrew Assistant Captain
8 years ago

Status field for a duration not working properly

I have a duration field called [Contract Down Time]. I would like to put a status on this that would return "Downtime Reported" if there is a value in the field, and "No Downtime" if the field was lef...
MCFNeil's avatar
MCFNeil
Qrew Captain
8 years ago
Try to use the IsNull function rather than the <>"".

If(IsNull([Contract Down Time]),

If the field properties for the duration field have "treat blank values as '0' in calculations" it will cause your <>"" to have the value of 0, so its not ever blank.
  • AndreonnaGarret's avatar
    AndreonnaGarret
    Qrew Assistant Captain
    8 years ago
    This helped partially. I had to uncheck the "treat blanks as 0" on my duration field. Unchecking that seems to have worked. 

    The problem now is that if it's blank the status works, but if my employees filling the report out put a zero in there (which they do all the time) it doesn't work. 

    Any suggestions?
  • MCFNeil's avatar
    MCFNeil
    Qrew Captain
    8 years ago
    If([Contract Down Time]<=0,   ....

    Or do they put 0 and you want that to be true if they put 0?
  • AndreonnaGarret's avatar
    AndreonnaGarret
    Qrew Assistant Captain
    8 years ago
    This is what I originally tried. I couldn't do that because the status field is text and the [Contract Down Time] field is a duration. 
  • MichaelBarrow's avatar
    MichaelBarrow
    Qrew Cadet
    8 years ago
    If you want to catch both a null and a blank, for any field type, my experience is that it's best to use the Length function (in conjunction with ToText for non-text fields).

    If( Length(ToText([Non-textField])) = 0, <it's null or blank>, <it's not null or blank> )

    It really irritates me that QB decided to make the IsNull function not work right with text fields. That makes no sense to me, but the Length work-around does the trick.