>In VFP 5.0a, working in a local view, I am showing a list of patients from a medial record database with the
>following columns:
>
>cFirstname,cMiddlename,cLastname,cChartNumber,PHYSICIAN
>
>PHYSICIAN is just a reference for the user, so I actually build the physician's fullname by calling a routine I
>wrote, BuildFullName:
>
>buildFullName(Physicians.cFirstName, Physicians.cMiddleName, Physicians.cLastName, Physicians.cSuffix)
>AS PHYSICIAN
>
>I store only the primary key of the physician in the patient record, and then use a left outer join to get the
>above result. However, I keep getting the error:
>
>Field PHYSICIAN does not accept null values.
>
>because some patient's don't have a physician assigned to them yet. Is there anything I can do in the syntax to
>force this calculated field to accept null values? I'd rather not change my BuildFullName() routine to return
>"N/A" or whatever.
>
>Thanks.

2 Suggestions, Jeff:

First, make sure your tables are set so they don't accept null values. That way the physician ID will be a blank space (for character data) or a 0 (if your IDs are numeric).

Second, use the IsNull() function or the NVL() function in your BuildFullName function.

HTH
Barbara