Maybe I did not JM. On the one hand, I am not sure why a test is necessary, since I already know that the field is empty, having made sure that the field is indeed empty of any data. Now this is where it becomes confusing to me. You are telling me (at least that is what I understand) the issue is that I am attempting to cast a Null as type string when it is not. But with the property set to allow DBNull, I still do not understand why I get this error for this particular field, but not for others that have the identical setting and none of which throw an exception if the field that I am passing from is empty.

Or to put it another way, why does that cast fail for this particular string field, but not for other string fields?