About empty of date being treated as equivalent to UNIX TIME=0 when sorting

k-abe · 2024-07-12T03:09:06.224Z

We are now building a data store service related to real estate.
It have a (1970/1/1) UNIX TIME or earlier date stored in this and sorted by it.
If the value contains an empty, since I think empty has treated as 0 , the sorting process is performed in such a way that the empty data comes to the 0 part of the UNIX TIME.

ex.
… ,[built at 1971] ,[built at 1971] , [empty] , [empty] , [built at 1967], [built at 1964] , …

Whether this should be regarded as a bug or not depends on the interpretation of empty, but unless you know the internal specification of the date type, this is completely unexpected behaviour.

Does anyone else have problems with this kind of behaviour?
We can fill EMPTY with sufficiently old values,
but I think there is also the idea that it is better to fix the behaviour of “empty” now.

tylerboodman · 2024-07-12T03:30:54.971Z

As a temp fix you could search for things sorted by date but with the constraint date isn't empty, then merge the same search but date is empty so those are at the end