Re: [phpesp-dev] Rank problem when answer not required (revisited)

[Paul B. <pbo...@sc...>]

James,

Thank you for your fast response.

No, unanswered questions are set to 0 because a value *is* required. 
Even when specified a NULL to put there, it becomes 0 because the table 
field properties require it to be NOT NULL. By default this is 0 in 
MySQL. This was originally from a 1.4 installation, but even in the 
1.6.1 archive it is still like that:

-- # answers to rank questions
CREATE TABLE response_rank (
	response_id	INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
	question_id	INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
	choice_id	INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
	rank		INT NOT NULL,
	PRIMARY KEY(response_id,question_id,choice_id)
);


Perhaps it would be nice to have a small additional ENUM field that sets 
wether a value is entered or none to avoid ambuigities (perhaps also for 
future other question types since it may also arise when for example an 
integer 0 would be a valid answer for a question).

Or is there already something like that that I overlooked (and with 
which I could recover the data for a large phd related survey)?

Thanks anyway for your development of phpesp which is still a very good 
package and used by a few collegues.

Regards

Paul

James Flemer wrote:


> 
> Paul,
> 
> Are you certain that unanswered questions are not NULL?  It's been a
> while since I looked at this, but I thought that's what was used for
> unanswered questions.  If it is not the case, I believe it should be.  A
>  NULL value makes more sense to me than a magic number.
> 
> -James