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AFG-Polio-Data / APMIS-Project

APMIS (Afghanistan Polio Management Information System) is an supplemental Immunization Activities management system to manage the vaccination activities in the country.
https://test.afghanistan-apmis.com
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Summing numbers including null vales adds the string 'null' into the field #704

Open bnygren opened 4 weeks ago

bnygren commented 4 weeks ago

Situation: In the DC daily compilation H2H, it was observed that the when a calculation sums several fields, and one of these includes a null value, the resulting calculated value includes the string 'null'. e.g.,

If you look at any calculated field, in any form, when the function tries to sum values that include blank values or 0, it appends the text 'null' rather than treating it as 0. For instance, in this example, there were 690 children vaccinated on days 1-3 and 0 on day 4. The 'Total Children Vaccinated Days 1-4' should be 690, but is instead "690.0null". This is shown in the table in 'Campaign Data' and also in the exported csv file. (Example is DC Daily Compilation H2H, Aug CR 2024, South/Kandahar/Maruf/Kazaki).

We handle these in the dashboard through the scripted data cleaning/processing steps, but it leads to frustration among data users who rely on downloading files through the 'Campaign Data' Export and analyzing manually in Excel.

Preferred Solution: In mathematical calculations (summing, generally) involving numbers and blank fields, treat blank fields as zeroes.

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DevSeg commented 2 weeks ago

@bnygren, after carefully reviewing the issue and evaluating possible fixes, we believe it would be appropriate to label this as an improvement/validation rather than a bug. Additionally, we plan to release a wiki to provide a detailed reference to the eventual solution.

bnygren commented 1 week ago

Per @DevSeg 's request, reclassified as improvement