Function NOTHING

You probably will never need this function / value directly. But details surrounding NOTHING are explained here.

NOTHING is a special value that you may encounter from time to time in DocuMold. It has some similarities to Excel’s #N/A and NA().

The main ways to produce NOTHING are:

• some functions return it when there is no value to give, for example:
  • INDEX return NOTHING when the position is greater than the size of the list
  • FIND return NOTHING when the text to find is not in the text to look in
  • IF return NOTHING when the condition is false and no value for if_false was provided
• When nothing is selected in a @PICK_ONE_QUESTION(..., optional: TRUE) or a @YES_NO_QUESTION(..., optional: TRUE), the variable is set to NOTHING
• When a @DATE_QUESTION(..., optional: TRUE) or a @NUMBER_QUESTION(..., optional: TRUE) did not receive a value, their variable is set to NOTHING

Writing the NOTHING value to a document will not write anything, it’s treated the same as an empty text. However, if you try to give NOTHING to a function that doesn’t expect its parameter to be NOTHING then an error will be reported.

To deal with some examples above, you might want to know that a value is NOTHING so that you can display a different message, for example. You can use ISNOTHING for this purpose, or some other IS... function.

For this special function, the parentheses can be and are normally omitted. NOTHING and NOTHING() are equivalent, so NOTHING is preferred.