The original poster asked how to generate a "null item" in an IMAGE
field.

I think some of the responses have played fast and loose with the term
"null item".  The first thing you have to do is define exactly what you
mean by that.

As I recall (sorry, my manuals are at work), TurboIMAGE itself has no
concept of a null item.  So it's up to the application to decide what
it's going to consider to be a null item.

If the application is QUERY, then, yes, QUERY does have an idea of what
a null item is.  It's going to depend on the type of the item.  I am
guessing that QUERY will never report "NULL ITEM" on a numeric item, at
least not on an I type item.  I think that all bit patterns in an I
field are valid--there are no forbidden values that QUERY will consider
to be null.  On a character field, such as type X, I think QUERY reports
"NULL ITEM" if ALL characters in the field are the ASCII character NUL,
that is, the character with the numeric value of 0.  How to generate a
field full of those characters depends on the language.  In COBOL, the
figurative constant LOW-VALUES should work nicely.

Walter  

Walter J. Murray

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