idea Allow Default Value to be blank in Data Management Ideas

Allow Default Value to be blank

JustinSmith6 — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 00:08:39 GMT

There should be an option in geodatabases to set the default value to blank. In many cases I do not want to see <NULL> where there is no value. ESRI’s recommended workaround is to select all the <NULL> values and use the field calculator to make the selected values blank with “”. I must now include this workaround into my workflows in order to have a blank record.

Below is an image of road labels. The label is concatenated with prefix direction, street name, street suffix, and postfix directional. There are no values for prefix direction and postfix directional in the two road labels, so ArcGIS labels them with null by default.

I can set the default value to be anything, but not blank. It should take less work to have a record be blank, not more.

Re: Allow Default Value to be blank

RobertKlein3 — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 22:04:19 GMT

Agreed. Additionally there should be a more intelligent way to concatenate for labeling expressions, with conditional behavior based on whether a prefix direction field, e.g. is NULL.

Re: Allow Default Value to be blank - Status changed to: Closed

SSWoodward — Thu, 18 May 2023 18:19:50 GMT

Re: Allow Default Value to be blank

Bud — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 16:09:27 GMT

@SSWoodward Is there an explanation as to why this idea was closed?

Re: Allow Default Value to be blank

SSWoodward — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 17:26:04 GMT

@Bud,

The Idea here was to allow for a way to not have the text "null" display when concatenating fields for labels. In the current version of ArcGIS Pro, fields with no value (<Null>) do not display the text "null" as they did in the version of the software that was used in the example.