Resolving an Alias When No Data Exists

The PERSON, PERSON_NAME, PERSONAL_DT_FST, and JOB tables always have rows for every employee who has completed the hire process. Other tables, however, may not contain rows for all your employees. For example, if you create a custom table to record effective-dated union code information, employees who have never belonged to a union do not have a row on the table.

If you create an alias to such a table and the system can't find a row for a particular employee, the alias takes a default value, depending on the field type:

Field Type	Default Value of Alias
Alphanumeric fields	Default to space.
Numeric fields	Default to zero.
Date fields	Do not default. Default processing ends with an error when there is no row for an employee.

To prevent an error in the case of a date field, you can create rows for all employees. You might consider creating a workflow process that creates a row when an employee is first hired. For example, if you have a custom table that tracks employees' leave statuses, an employee that has never been on leave does not have any entries in this table. You could use PeopleSoft Workflow to create a row when the employee is hired. You would probably use the hire date in this particular table.