Hello:

I made a calculation which turns a number into text. The calculation was working fine, until I imported updates.

When I went back to recalculate the fields, and chose "calculation" as the field type, it completely wiped out the data in the field. I tried it more than once with my backup copies, and each time the contents of the field is completely deleted.

Can anyone tell me why this is happening??

Alisun

A Calculation field strictly fills in a value based on the calculation formula for all records. If you change a field to be a Calculation, you'll get a little warning dialog about this.

If you want to leave existing values, try leaving the field as number or text, and use a Records->Replace Field Contents. That will replace the field contents for the found set with whatever your calculated value is. Be sure to make a backup before playing with Replace, as there's no Undo.

Alisun,

It's not completely clear what the details of your situation are, however, a little speculation.

Changing a field to type:calculation from any other type will replace the current content and so, you would expect lose the content on this transformation.

However, in a test in FM 9 I was able to convert a field to a calculation which referenced its own content and got a proper result.

So the problem MAY be in the natural conversion to calc... or not.

Another possibility is that the result of your calculation is null. Look around at the fields that provide arguments for your calc and make sure this is not the proper result based on the updated data.

Even if you have what appears to be a valid calculation, trying to do that calc in a field whose calculation result type is not what you expect can cause you to get unexpected result. The result type is a pop list in the lower left of the calculation dialog.

More details of the process might help suggest other possible causes.

Don