Controlling Nulls

One of the common bugaboos that haunt novice Access programmers is working with null values. When a field or variable is Null, it signifies that it has no valid data. This is in contrast to zero-length, which means that the value contains a string that has a zero length, or Empty, which means that a variant variable has not been initialized (assigned a value for the first time). All three values are hard to distinguish because they all represent a non or blank value. To help you differentiate between the three, keep the following in mind:

  • Variant is the only data type that can hold the Empty, Null, and Nothing special values.

  • The Null, Empty, and zero-length values all have no character that outputs to either a screen or a printer. ...

Get Access 2002 Programming by Example now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.