I use a fixed dataprovider for the date axis, e.g. the last 28 days with every day defined. The LineSeries then uses this and its dp has missing values like your 2nd scenario, i.e. there are no entries at all for some dates. I will try creating a data provider that returns all dates but with value=null (as opposed to value="0", which is a valid value).
As the database only returns values for dates where there is data, I will have to go through the series dp, check it has values for all the dates in the range and if any are missing, add an entry with a null. This behaviour seems very illogical to me - it should respect the interpolateValues=false in both cases. Thanks for the pointers. Neil.