Working of SELECT SINGLE when field is blank

Hi,

In MARA table I have a custom field for Production End Date, which is blank for the two materials that I want to retrieve. Lets call the materials A and B.

In my code I do a select single from MARA table based on Material number and use it to populate a structure T_MARA of type MARA.

For material A, after the select statement the production end date field in the T_MARA structure is blank. However for material B, the Production end Date field is 00000000 which is the default value for Date fields.

I want to know why the select statement acts different for different materials. There is no conversion routine maintained for that field.

Anyone has a clue ?

Thanks,

Urmila