"Blank" date or datetime in apps (5 to 7 migrarton experience)

Migration from 5 to 7 brought me to another problem. Users reported me of a starnge behavior like they are not getting propper reports as they used to get before the migration. After my investigation I found the following. Some of applications that were written for the old engine used queries based on retrieving records with not null date/datetime fields. Instead of checking those fields just for null values, application programmer used statements like that: select whatever from tab where date_field is not null and date_field != " " With version 4.x, 5.x it worked fine, but after the migration to 7 such statements return no records. This creates a big headache to me. I understand that this is a bad programming, but I had to live with that since I inherited the applications. Now I am facing a magor problem of tracking such statements and rewrite them. Anyway, what I am interested is what space character " " means for date/datetime field in 7.x. If I run the statement select * from tab where date_field != " " I get no rows found ! -- ======================================================================= Boris Niyazov Ph: 212-854-4094 IT Department Fax: 212-316-2623 Columbia Law School Email: ban5@columbia.edu