Does the StatisticsCollector policy convert negative numbers to positive?

[jonathangunter]

I have a Statistics collector policy that sometimes gets a negative number from the variable, client_request.mystat.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<StatisticsCollector async="false" continueOnError="false" enabled="true" name="my_policy">
    <DisplayName>MyPolicy</DisplayName>
    <FaultRules/>
    <Properties/>
    <Statistics>
        <Statistic name="MyStat" ref="client_request.mystat" type="integer">0</Statistic>
    </Statistics>
</StatisticsCollector>

However, when looking at reporting, it seems the minimum value of this stat logged is is 1, not -1. And when I try to sum up this stat, the totals seem to confirm my hypothesis that 1 is being logged to the system, not -1.

Am I missing something here?

[dknezic]

I believe nothing will get stored if you're trying to use -1 for a float or integer.

What's your use case or why would you want to include and mix negative numbers with positive numbers in analytics?

[jonathangunter]

It's actually a bug in our logic that was causing -1 to be submitted with some requests. We didn't intend things to work that way, but I'd like to know what the analytics consequences of the bug were.