Cheers steve, chr(13) does the same as vbNewLine in datacolumn
expressions though

ISNULL(Field,"") works from stored procedures so thats been pretty
useful - is that pretty costly performance wise? is there a nicer
option?

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I'm trying to either use and expression based column in my dataset which
concatenates fields (this has got be a common task, name, new line, address
and post code) but have had trouble because carriage returns don't appear to
be supported, but more importantly if any of the fields contain a null the
whole expression returns null

The other option would appear to be to have SQL Server do it for me - I'm
still relatively new to SQL Server and again, if any fields are null then
the whole expression returns null

How do I get round this!!??

Thanks

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Ahh, NULL propogation :) Carriage return is supported, you need to use the
CHAR function to insert the proper character. A carrage return is: CHAR(13)

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Use the ISNULL function for each field that may return null, you can
substitute a replacement value.

Steve

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I've never benchmarked performance, the only other technique I could think
of would be correction of the base field data and prevention of NULLS being
entered by using constraints.

Steve