>>> Blank? or null?

> I always put a string value in, but the string could have zero
> length. I don't honestly know if that results in a blank or null in
> IB.

The difficulty being that blanks will sort to the top, nulls will sort
to the end - and both look the same at the client.

What I generally do is...

Unless a field specifically needs to support null, I setup
insert/update triggers on the table that detect null and assign blank.

IF( FIELDNAME IS NULL ) THEN
FIELDNAME = '';

This helps me avoid all sorts of problems, such as complications while
concatenating strings etc. By doing it in the triggers in this way I
avoid having nulls creep in in unexpected situations (such as
explicit assignment of null, or different client app used to access
the database.)

I do similar things with number fields - but usually not date fields
as NULL actually has some use in that situation.

Of course you dont do this to foreign key fields - as null has
significance. There can be other instances where you dont wont this
sort of processing but that depends on the app.

hth

--
Geoff Worboys
Telesis Computing