Kevin,

That would work in some cases, but I have a requirement where zero is the least likely value so it wouldn't make sense to default it to zero. There is also the possibility of the user accidently deleting the value and then zero would inadvertently be inserted. I could probably prevent this with client-side validation, but doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of having the business rules in the business objects?

I think part of the problem is that the web controls are really text based controls (HTML) where an empty string is natively acceptable. The MM datasets retain the null value but the entities do not when the column is non-nullable.

Al