DataColumn Expression Divide By Zero

Question

I'm using basic .net DataColumns and the associated Expression property.

I have an application which lets users define which columns to select from a database table. They can also add other columns which perform expressions on the data columns resulting in a custom grid of information.

The problem I have is when they have a calculation column along the lines of "(C2/C3)*100" where C2 and C3 are data columns and the value for C3 is zero. The old "divide by zero" issue.

The simple answer would be to convert the expression to "IIF(C3 = 0, 0, (C2/C3)*100)", however we don't expect the user to know to do that and at compile time I don't know what columns are defined. So I would have to programmatically determine which columns are being used in a division in order to construct the IIF clause. That could get quite tricky.

Is there another way to not throw an error and replace the result with 0 if a "Divide By Zero" error occurs?

Answer 1

Ok, I found a way. The key is to use Double and not Decimal for the column type, e.g. in the example above C3 should be a Double. This will result in a result of Infinity instead, which can be evaluated against using the expression as a whole.

E.g. IIF(CONVERT(([C4] / [C3] )*100, 'System.String') = 'NaN' OR CONVERT(([C4] / [C3] )*100, 'System.String') = 'Infinity' OR CONVERT(([C4] / [C3] )*100, 'System.String') = '-Infinity', 0, ([C4] / [C3] )*100)

Decimal it seems doesn't provide that Infinity option.