Barbara -

thanks, your second suggestion solved the problem.

First I checked and found that I did have the physician's primary key field in the patient record accepting null values, and so toggled that back off. It didn't have any effect.

Then I added this to the end of my BuildFullname() routine:

if isnull(cFullName)
cFullName = ""
endif

return cFullName

Problem Solved!

Thanks.

Jeffery Cotton


>>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