Blank vs empty square

Victoria_G1

Hello everyone,

I encountered these two fields in one of my columns ("blank" vs empty square), which is messing a bit with my formulas. Why is this happening? What's the difference between the two?

Thanks so much!

Ashleigh

@Victoria_G1 I find that if someone put a space or nextline in the source data it may cause it to come through Domo as blank and not null. You can try to do a squash space in your formula and then a case statement that looks for both nulls and single spaces and replaces them with text like:

case

when COLUMN is null then 'Blank'

when COLUMN = ' ' then 'Blank'

else COLUMN

end

Here is the squash whitespace formula found in the formula tile

MichelleH

@Victoria_G1 "Blank" typically means there is a null (i.e. no value). They empty square is most likely an empty string, which is a text value with a length of zero. Can you share a little more about the formula challenges you're experiencing?

Ashleigh

@Victoria_G1 I find that if someone put a space or nextline in the source data it may cause it to come through Domo as blank and not null. You can try to do a squash space in your formula and then a case statement that looks for both nulls and single spaces and replaces them with text like:

case

when COLUMN is null then 'Blank'

when COLUMN = ' ' then 'Blank'

else COLUMN

end

Here is the squash whitespace formula found in the formula tile