Division Always Yields 1 or 0 in SAP BusinessObjects Data Services

Question

Going to be answering my own question here, but I wanted to post this to get some attention in case anyone else ever comes across this.

Within the BusinessObjects Data Services Designer, I have two decimal(36, 10) values, and I'd like to divide one by the other. In order to account for divide-by-zero situations, I have to first check if the denominator is zero, so I end up with an ifthenelse statement like the following:

ifthenelse(Query.Denominator = 0, 0, Query.Numerator / Query.Denominator)

When I execute my job, however, I end up always getting 0 or 1, rather than a decimal value.

Answer 1

And as I said, I already had an answer here, just wanted to provide this for the community.

An ifthenelse statement is interesting, in that it takes its data type from the second parameter. In the code example above, it assumes the correct data type is the data type of the parameter "0", which happens to be an integer.

When the ifthenelse receives a value from "else", it converts it to an integer. So a value of 0.356 becomes 0 and 0.576 becomes 1.

The trick is to cast the "0" to a decimal(36, 10):

ifthenelse(Query.Denominator = 0, cast(0, 'Decimal(36, 10)'), Query.Numerator / Query.Denominator)

Answer 2

Thanks for this, I thought I was going crazy!

Incidentally, for something slightly simpler, this also works:

ifthenelse(Query.Denominator = 0, 0.0, Query.Numerator / Query.Denominator)