I don't want to enter the religious wars about NULLS and whether they should
or should not be allowed in Databases.  I have a legacy database and I can't
change it.  NULLS are a fact of life for me.

My question is whether anyone has a less labor intensive solution. 

In the auto-generated class definition code for the datarow of eacch table
is code like the following...

Public Property Birthday As Date
            Get
                Try
                    Return CType(Me(Me.tableo_Person.BirthdayColumn),Date)
                Catch e As InvalidCastException
                    Throw New StrongTypingException("Cannot get value
because it is DBNull.", e)
                End Try
            End Get
            Set
                Me(Me.tableo_Person.BirthdayColumn) = value
            End Set
        End Property

I have been modifying this code to...
Public Property Birthday As Date
            Get
                Try
                    Return CType(Me(Me.tableo_Person.BirthdayColumn),Date)
                Catch e As InvalidCastException
                    return nothing
                End Try
            End Get
            Set
                if value = nothing then
                   Me(Me.tableo_Person.BirthdayColumn) = system.convert.dbnull
                else
                   Me(Me.tableo_Person.BirthdayColumn) = value
                endif
            End Set
        End Property

This code gets generated anytime I have to redrag a datatable into a
dataset.  Then I have to go thru each field and modify as above again.

Is there a smarter way to do this?  (I'm normally a foxpro programmer, but
this one is going against a SQL server database, if that has any bearing on
this question)

Since you're using VB.nET you can easily use IIF with IsDBNull
http://www.knowdotnet.com/articles/handlingnullvalues.html

Show quoteHide quotesystem.convert.dbnull
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Show quote Hide quote When I generate a strongly-typed DataSet from a database which has columns
which allow NULL, it also generates an Is<columnName>Null method. Do you
have such a method? If not, I wonder why it didn't think the Birthday column
allowed NULL?

John Saunders

I hadn't noticed that procedure before, but yes it did generate it.  I can
use that to handle the situation ourside of the dataset.vb code.  Thanks
bunches.

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