Monday, June 26, 2006

NULL format display when upgrading to 10.1.2

It seems that when you upgrade from a previous version of Discoverer to 10.1.2 that the existing default setting for null values has changed from blank to the word NULL. This is annoying because it means that the default display for null values in 10.1.2 is not the same as it was in previous releases. What this means is that old workbooks that contain null values will now display the word NULL instead of blank. One of my customers reported this to Oracle as a service request and received the following reply:

You will need to open each and every workbook, make the change and resave. There is no global setting to apply for previously created and saved workbooks unfortunately.Hope the above information was informative. If this answers your question kindly close the TAR else feel free to update the TAR.

My customer has 100s of workbooks and it will take some time to go through this. I pity the person who has 1000s of workbooks because they will have to do this for each and every one! Don't be fooled into thinking that what you set in pref.txt will help because it won't. The upgrade is done using Discoverer Administrator which does not even know of the existence of pref.txt so it will ignore whatever you have set and will use its own default which is NULL.

If anyone knows of a workaround please let me know. Otherwise, if you have encountered this issue yourself please share your experience.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Michael,
Even I have got the same issue.
We are upgraded to 10.1.2 recently.

I couldn't found workarounds as of now. Logged a TAR with Oracle and it's going on, no solution yet.!!

Please let me know, if you come accross any experiences/suggestions

Regards,
Chandra.

Michael said...

Hi Chandra
I suspect that you won't get anywhere I'm afraid to say. There's definitely a bug here but so far it is not one that has raised any level of urgency inside Oracle.
Best wishes
Michael

Anonymous said...

Hi Michael,
Thank you for this blog.
Finally Oracle came up with a fix for this issue it seems. Asking me to apply patch number: 5082551

from my side, I yet to apply this patch and see. Will do it asap and come back to this page to post updates.

Regards,
Chandra

Michael said...

Hi Chandra
That's great. Let me know as soon as you have tried it out and I will make a new posting.
If the patch isn't too big, would you mind zipping it and sending it to me?

Best wishes
Michael

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