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Using NULL in Advanced Search

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rick.ca:

--- Quote from: buah on March 06, 2010, 09:16:45 pm ---All what we said here made me thought of "NULL" as a "application/database is not aware of it" and for NOT NULL as a "application/database is/became aware of it", rather than unknown/known, empty/not-empty, blank/not-blank, etc...
--- End quote ---

That's not surprising. But it seems too technical a nuance to be useful to most users, whereas the latter are well understood and expected. If it can coexist with functions that most users need and find intuitive without creating unnecessary confusion, then fine. Otherwise, I think we should be looking for ways to simply things and make the search functions more user-friendly. Any functionality that may be lost will likely only be noticed by those of us geeky enough that we're able to find another way to do what we want to do anyway.

mgpw4me@yahoo.com:
Clearing a movie sets all the values to default, so it IS POSSIBLE to set a NULL value in PVD (if the default value is NULL).  The description field is an example.

Regardless, I either have information or I don't.  I don't care if a script doesn't return a value...it's the same thing...there isn't any data.  To me, NULL / NOT NULL are not particularly useful and they confuse the issue...do you have data or not?  

The only place I can find where NULL has value is in setting a birthday or date of death, and those can both be text fields with a zero length...conversion to numeric values could be done easily enough if you really need to know the age of a person and can't do the math yourself.  Given that dates are text values when the script gets them, and are converted to a date value when submitted to the database, I see this as a better solution that having nulls for a single instance.

A rating of 0 is the same...it can't be set via IMDB...it isn't allowed by their database.  0 = no rating.  I have more than my share of movies where users commented they would have rated it lower, if it were possible.

On the programming end, I can see that nulls do have value.  It's easier to update a field if there is a standard value (null) for all field types (in particular when you have the option to have a field updated always, if no data exists, or never).  The PVD interface is already more than complex enough and should be simplified where possible.

rick.ca:

--- Quote ---I have more than my share of movies where users commented they would have rated it lower, if it were possible.
--- End quote ---

I didn't say it in my last post, but now I can't resist... It's not hard to see the virtues in a -10 to 10 scale, where negative means degrees of "bad," positive means degrees of "good" and "0" means indifferent. But, aside from being just plain silly, that's not the scale that has been chosen. I suppose these people might also comment, "Roger Ebert gave this 1/2 star—he must have liked it a little." ;D

mgpw4me@yahoo.com:
You don't know the half of it...here's what I'm up against  ;)

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buah:
All this fuss started because I wanted to RATE my seen UNRATED movies.
This was my thought process.
"How to get unrated movies? Their fields are blank, so filter NULL seen movies. OK, here they are. Nice... So, let's check if rated movies are "seen minus NULL". I'll apply NOT NULL, that far out makes sense!"

And that is when curiosity killed the cat.

If PVD was designed to start rating form 1, I assure you I'd apply Asearch "Rating<1" for getting unrated movies. I would never think of NULL, and I'd still live in ignorance, blessed it was!


[EDIT] mgp, you posted while I was typing my post. Now, I look at your IMDb statistics (man, you have way too many bad movies ;D) and new question arises. In legend, for example "4-6", "6-8" for IMDb rating and especially for personal rating in what count rating 6.0 is included?

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