>PADR(NVL(i1,""),11) is wrong for .NULL. value
>
>See message#1407524
>
>Agnes
>
I'm not sure what do you mean here, it works OK for me.

I just tested TRANSFORM function too, it also returns NULL when we pass NULL

lcD = 'test'
lcD = NULL
?MESSAGEBOX(TRANSFORM(lcD))

It is not mentioned in Help, but I think this behavior with NULLs is quite predictable.