No, I'm not that Bryan Robson...

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Breaking News:We're ranked #1 on Ask.com for "obscenely comfy seating"! I'm so proud...

Thanks to a colleague who I shall refer to only as "Mr. Picky", I've just been playing with decimals.

I know they're the slowest numeric data type, but we're talking XML and xs:decimal, and classes created thereof.

Mr. Picky's complaint was that of all of the values (prices, in fact) in the XML file, some were formatted with 2 decimal places, and some with none, and he'd like to see them all with 2.

Now, after a bit of fiddling about, I couldn't see any obvious reason why we had these differences.  The prices all originated in the same fields in the database, and they all ended up as XML attributes declared as xs:decimal, and passed through VB.Net classes as Decimal variables.

The heart of the issue is VB.Net's Decimal handling.  By default a Decimal has zero decimal places, but if it acquires any along the way then it will keep them.  Some of my values had spent part of their life as a string (something like "£12.34", and don't ask why!) and some were just plain Decimals.  All the attributes where the values had been strings had their 2DP, as they'd been parsed from strings like "12.00" and so when the VB.Net class went ToXml() they appeared as "12.00", but those that were never strings stayed as "12".

My solution?  (and I ain't proud of this)

Dim decimalWith2DecimalPlaces As Decimal = decimalValueFromDb * Decimal.Parse("1.00")