How to display FLOAT in 99999.999 format

How do I force display of a FLOAT

in a format like

Original number Result

1234.34             1234.340
12345.456	 12345.456
123.1	             123.100
123                    123.000   

The dev on a project wants to preformat the data for a report on the database side.

He wants 3 places after the decimal to display even if the number is a whole number....

(I know most VB report controls do this easily....but...)

I thought it was complicated as it would require a to_char with format description then searching for the postion of the decimal and then moving from there to the right counting the characters if the number of characters to the right of the decimal was < 3 then pad with zeros...

I messed around with RPAD, TRUNC, ROUND and TO_CHAR and found I was not able handle all cases of possible significant digits.

Sounded like a complicated function to do something thats automagic in a reporting control. Or am I forgetting a oracle function....or fomat?

This is 8.1.7....

I told the developer to use the field formatting contols of his reporting control because the additional zeros padded in a number are basically meaningless in a database and mathematical operations.

Brad O.

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Author: Odland, Brad
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