Documentation on Null vs Blank

Question

Is there a doc anywhere that talks about when a field is Null and when it is Empty string?

It my testing I have seen that for a Hosted Feature Service if a user leaves a field blank, or if it is not relevant, it it gets empty string.  This is true even for Int/Dec which is not possible in most Arc.  But when you download that data to a GDB int and decimal convert to Null, but strings stay empty string.  Dates not sure yet.

For now I have been adding code to my scripts to check for both "" and Null.

I want to make sure I know the pattern correctly.  Will there ever be a way to have strings be Null?  Or would this need to be post processing to match our legacy data.

Thanks

dougbrowning · Answer

Thanks but this does not cover what happens in the GDB export.  I do not see NaN being stored at any time.

thanks

BrettStokes · Answer

Hi Doug,

Here is the link to the "Empty Values" section of the Doc. It explains what you can expect to see for different question types when they receive no input.

Brett