Re: [office-formula] LOOKUP function

[Kohei Yoshida <kyoshida@novell.com>]

On Thu, 2008-04-24 at 17:02 +0200, Eike Rathke wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Monday, 2008-03-10 12:42:00 -0400, Kohei Yoshida wrote:
> 
> > > >   3) The lengths of the search vector and the result vector do not need 
> > > >     to be identical; however, when the match position falls outside 
> > > >     the length of the result vector, an error is raised if the result 
> > > >     vector is given as an array object.  If it's a cell range, it gets 
> > > >     automatically extended to the length of the searched vector.
> > > [...]
> > > >     If the cell range cannot be extended due to size limit, then '0'
> > > >     is displayed.
> > > 
> > > How odd..
> > 
> > Yeah.  So, this is a corner case specific to one particular application.
> > I'm not really sure if it's worthwhile to spec this, to be honest.
> 
> I just rewrote the LOOKUP definition to match the latest findings. This
> last piece is missing. I think we should define to return an error in
> this case, because returning 0 could be as bad as any other value.
> 
> Returning 0 may be the result of some "a not existing cell is an empty
> cell" thinking. However, if a loaded document for example had more rows
> than the application can handle, returning 0 for an off-limit access
> could be plain wrong. Generating a NA() error would be more appropriate.

Yup.  That sounds reasonable.  I don't think we'll get an
interoperability issue with this corner case, anyway.

Thanks.

Kohei

-- 
Kohei Yoshida - OpenOffice.org Engineer - Novell, Inc.
<kyoshida@novell.com>