upgrading postgresql broke some queries

Hi All,

I recently upgraded my box to the latest version. The previous one was a
bit outdated. Apparently we have some bad structure formatting in our db
design, cause the latest version broke our software. The issue is some
character varying fields are used in queries joining to integers. The old db
server was just allowing us to join INT to CHAR. Now its not. I researched
on some ways to fix this, i can do CAST(field AS text) in my queries, but
there are dozens and they are hard to find.

I was wondering if there is an easy global solution for this. I cant just
alter the CHAR fields to INT because some rows have empty values. I can just
change them to 'zero' and alter type to integer but im worried i can lose
some functionality because some queries again is looking for empty value.

thanks