RSS Feed

Plugin Developer Discussion

I wanted to do something with CFixFor classes. Now they have properties dt and dtStart, both wich can be NULL in the database. Fine.

The docs say:
"The planned date in UTC of the release, or Null for (None)."
http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/library/70/html/30638579.htm
and
"The earliest possible start date in UTC, or Null for start as soon as possible."
http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/library/70/html/2BE89402.htm

However, both are declared as plain DateTime properties, not nullable (not DateTime?). Therefore, they will never be null. So how exacly is this supposed to work? I looked into api.Database to see if there was something like an IsNull function which would tell me if a specific DateTime is a NULL placeholder value, but no, nothing.

So, is this an error in the API, did I miss something?

Hi Arsène,
Yes, you are correct, the documentation is incorrect and beyond that what FogBugz does is a bit odd. We use System.DateTime.MinValue to indicate a no date (and this maps to a NULL in the database). Can you work with that? I've opened a bug to at least fix the docs on this.
Thanks!
Brett

Thanks for the quick answer. I thought that this may be the NULL placeholder value, but since I didn't see any documentation pointing me in this direction I didn't want to use a value which may or may not be correct.

Maybe adding some static helper functions which check for the pseudo-NULLs (the DateTime.MinValue, -1 for ix* etc.) may hide the internals a bit, so that code can rely on having functions which correctly identify the internal NULL values.

Hi Arsène-
Yes, that's what we do internally, and we need to expose them in the API.
Thanks!
Brett