A little OT: Blank date fields in 200LX database

[Dave Britten]

I'm making a 200LX database file for recording medications. One of the fields is "Discontinued", for recording the date which the medication is discontinued.

I'd like to make a subset (F6) that only shows records where that field is blank, i.e. still current.

According to this article, I should be able to use "!*Discontinued" as the SSL expression in order to look for a blank date field:

http://www.palmtoppaper.com/ptphtml/44/44c00013.htm

But when I do that, I just get all records again. The entire expression I'm using is exactly as follows:

!*Discontinued

Am I misunderstanding their explanation? Database tells me that I'm running version 1.1 - not sure if there are any other versions in different ROM revisions. Also, does anybody know where to find the GENERAL.GDB file referenced in that article? I was searching high and low, but couldn't find it.

[Dave Britten]

I found a copy of GENERAL.GDB finally. (http://super.hplx.net/anonftp/pub/gengdb.zip). There are lots of useful tips in there; I recommend downloading it if you have a 200LX.

Anyway, when filtering that database the same way ("!*Date field") it works fine for the existing records. If I add a new record, it will still show up even if the date field has been filled in. I'm suspicious that it's some sort of weird parser behavior that's unexpected but useful in certain circumstances. Apparently I'm falling outside of those circumstances somehow.

I changed the filter to "Discontinued>{12/31/2099}" and that seems to give acceptable results. I wonder if there's a way to have it filter based on the current date...