null value

Hi all,

I am trying to figure out how to do something and I'm hoping someone here can tell me how.

I need to show records based on:

1) authorization level = 7
2) the person belonging to committee 1 or committee 2.

If I go into the database and manually set each database record to null for committee_ID and committee_2_ID (unless of course they are on a committee) the following works.

SELECT *
FROM members
WHERE members.auth_ID=7 AND members.committee_ID is not null AND members.committee_2_ID is not null

but I cannot get the db fields for committee_ID and committee_2_ID to default to null if no committee is entered when a member is inserted or updated. So new members and any members who are edited to take them off a committee, is still showing up in my search.

any help is appreciated.