Jeff, glad it worked. You might need to go back into your files and do a mass search/replace for Nulls already existing in the table. Once you've gotten rid of them, you won't get any more (you DID retain the new settings, I presume).
Barbara

>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