> Field: INCOMEAPPL1 numeric(18,2)

If you have not already, please read the article on
http://www.ibobjects.com/TechInfo.html called "Working with Currency
and Scaled Numeric" (or something like that anyway). It has words to
say about using numeric(18,2) with Delphi apps and IBO in particular.

> FieldEditMask: INCOMEAPPL1=::NM::!\$\ 999],999],990;0;0;0
> DefaultValues: INCOMEAPPL1=0

> 1) When I click on the TIB_EditEnh field and enter it, a beep goes
> off. Why is that?

> 2) When I exit the field (after entering 250000), the field shows-
> up as $ 25,000,000. It looks like the numeric 2 decimals are also
> used to format the number.

When IBO sees a scaled numeric it treats as it is defined. That is
a value with fixed decimal places. So a value of zero AsString
becomes 0.00, and value of 250000 becomes 250000.00.

The control displays text, which means it asks IBO to give it the
text to display, and from the above you can see that IBO will give
it a value containing a decimal point.

The decimal point is an invalid character in the mask you have
supplied and so the control goes "beep" - indicating an invalid
character was received.

When you enter 250000 it gets written to the field, when you tab out
the control refreshes from the column, goes beep again (hopefully)
with the invalid decimal point character and so ends up reading
250000.00 as 25000000 (invalid character was ignored).


So thats what is happening. Its an interesting issue, I've not tried
to setup a numeric mask that displayed less that the whole field
before. I would be tempted to try and fix this in the mask processing
but...

The mask processing is purely a text/character arrangement. It does
not actually know that the characters make up a number, as far as the
mask is concerned it is simply processing a string of characters
against a defined set of rules. If I setup the ::NM:: numeric mask
processing to handle this specially it would truncate the apparent
value and not round - which seems inappropriate to me.

Note that it would be possible to ask IBO to handle the AsString
differently (not outputing the ".00" when no decimal place values
exist). However you would still experience the problems described
above if your value was 250000.01 (you would get 25000001).

I am happy to consider this issue in more detail, but I doubt if a
fix will happen quickly. It may actually need a new derivation,
something like TIB_Number, that can deal with the column number value
directly.

You could alter the mask so that it does not show decimal places if
none exist but supports decimal places if they do. Of course this
means it would support the input of decimal places - which is
presumably not what you want or your mask would have supported it
to begin with.

If the value was readonly you could cast the field to NUMERIC(16,0) in
the select statement and that would solve the problem. To make the
field properly editable in the current situation probably means using
stored procedures - or at least a custom insert/edit statement. Not
sure I have not tried it for something like this.


--
Geoff Worboys
Telesis Computing