Question

I am new to Oracle and I have ran into a problem. I have a form on my page that has a START_DATE and END_DATE, and I need to compare these values to their corresponding StartDate and EndDate columns in the DB. These columns are nullable so I am erroring out. What are the different ways around this? Using ToDate is not going to work easily because I am currently using a Filter class to build my query so I was looking for other options.

Answer 1

It’s going to depend on what kind of logic you use to handle the dates. If null for a start date means “doesn’t apply” and the same is true for end_date, then you could do something like:

WHERE date_I_care_about
  BETWEEN nvl(start_date,to_date('19000101','YYYYMMDD'))
      AND nvl(start_date,to_date('30000101','YYYYMMDD'))

That is, just plug in arbitrarily small and large values for start_date and end_date when you don’t have values.

But it depends on your specific logic as to whether the above is appropriate.