Rails - May 2005 - text_field and empty values

I am noticing that text_field returns empty strings instead of nil  
when inserting new records.

Am I missing something?

Does anyone have a clean way of insuring that empty fields are  
inserted as NULL in the database?

--
Lon Baker

Speedymac LLC
http://www.speedymac.com
AIM: spdemac
Skype: spdemac

Lon Baker wrote:
> Does anyone have a clean way of insuring that empty fields are  inserted 
> as NULL in the database?
Here''s what I do (although I''m sure this isn''t the
Ruby-est solution).  This
will trim whitespace and assign to nil if the result is an empty string:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
   before_save :nilify

protected

   def nilify
     self.title = nil   if self.title and (self.title = self.title.strip).empty?
   end
end

-- Steve