How to select MISSING / SPACE and NULL values in SAS Customer Intelligence Studio

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How MISSING / SPACE  and NULL values are treated and how to select them in SAS Customer Intelligence Studio:

Depending on the underlying database MISSING and/or SPACE are defined differently.  MISSING can contain a dot '.' where SPACE can contain a blank "  ".

When using Metadata=VALUES and AllowBlankValue=True as a custom attribute in your Information Map, you are able to select either [Missing] or [Space] from the list of “Select Values” in a select node as shown in the screenshot below:

You cannot select empty string from within SAS Customer Intelligence Studio.

AllowBlankValue is an option you can set in your Information Map but it only works when:

1. You really have NULL in the data.
2. You have configured the data item with the extended attribute "AllowBlankValue=TRUE" in the Information Map and you generate MA Metadata for this data item.

Have a look at the explanation below how NULL or BLANK values are treated in SAS Customer Intelligence:

If you are generating MA Metadata (SAS Datasets), then:

- “” (empty string) is not supported as a selection criteria value, and it may show up in MA Metadata counts as “Missing” because SAS treats “” and NULL as the same value, regardless of what the underlying database supports.

-  AllowBlankValue is meant to allow us to support “ “ - a string with a single blank value in it.

If you need to select “” (empty strings) the only possibility is to select all values for this specific data item and then check the rule “No value meets these criteria”:

 

or create a process node with the appropriate SQL statements.