Get Inspire insights from former attendees in our AMA discussion thread on Inspire Buzz. ACEs and other community members are on call all week to answer!

Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Find answers, ask questions, and share expertise about Alteryx Designer Desktop and Intelligence Suite.
SOLVED

Null, empty, blank or ???? fields

mgrau
7 - Meteor

Hi - I am trying to use a formula to flag a v string field when a name or number is not present. I am attaching the workflow and input to help answer this question. I've tried doing an IF statement with NULL, with EMPTY and with "     " but none of those have worked. I can see the field is blank but can't figure out what statement will detect whatever type of blank this is. Can you help? It is the formula to detect blanks in the constituent name field or blanks in the constituent id field. Detecting "9-999999" works fine so I thought "   " would. Thanks.

5 REPLIES 5
mmenth
11 - Bolide

Hi mgrau,

 

Could you upload an exported file? You can do this by going to Options -> Export Workflow

 

This should be a .yxzp file instead of the normal .yxmd

 

But in general, it wouldn't hurt to use the Data Cleansing Tool to remove unwanted characters. I would check 'Leading and Trailing Whitespace' and 'Tabs, Line Breaks, and Duplicate Whitespace' to remove these. Then perhaps one of the IF statements you tried previously will work.

 

Best,

Megan

mgrau
7 - Meteor

I tried all three choices after adding the Data cleansing tool to the input without any luck. So I must be missing something. Here's the exported workflow.

jdunkerley79
ACE Emeritus
ACE Emeritus

I suggest using IsEmpty(Trim(...))

 

Doing a quick test on you workbook seems to work

 

Attached a sample

mmenth
11 - Bolide

Just to make sure I'm understanding you correctly-- were you trying to check for blanks in the constituent name? If so, you didn't have that 'Salutation' field checked in the data cleansing tool. I changed that and then one of your formulas downstream and see that now some go into 'no name'. Does that solve your problem? See the attached solution!

mgrau
7 - Meteor

Thanks! I'm checking but that seems to either have helped a lot or hopefully fixed it!

Labels