Inconsistent Query Behavior with Negate Button Ignoring Blank Fields

[grantfitzsimmons]

Another non-intuitive query behavior I have discovered, only today, (and I’m not sure if this is intentional or a bug) is that querying with the negate button active and then querying again with the negate button inactive does not return all possible records - it ignores all records where that field is totally blank even though a blank field necessarily satisfies the ‘negate’ condition.

For example if I query records where field number contains “SMP” I get 977 results. When I query records where field number does NOT contain “SMP” I get 1511 results. Looks like I have only 2488 records - but there are another 3541 records with blank field number that didn’t appear in either search. This has caused me a lot of confusion and probably reporting wrong numbers to granting agencies in progress reports. I propose that the “negate” operation should include records where the queried field is empty since they logically fall under that category. Or at least make this behavior more explicit in the interface somehow.

Update: This only seems to be true for Specify7 - Specify6 includes empty results when you query for ‘NOT’ values.

Reported by: Paul at FWRI (Speciforum)

[specifysoftware]

This issue has been mentioned on Specify Community Forum. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.specifysoftware.org/t/specify-7-query-builder/289/6

[CarolineDenis]

@grantfitzsimmons, would it be possible to have screen shots of the queries?