Rails - Feb 2006 - nulls changing to blanks

Hi,

I have forms that are used to update rows in a table. There are some 
columns that allow nulls in the table.

Say that column X is allowed to be null. The text box for column X shows 
up with nothing in it because it is null. When I hit submit on the 
update page, the value of that column is changed from null to blank (the 
empty string, or ''''). This might sound trivial, but there is a
different
code base that expected nulls and had to be fixed to work around this.

Of course, I can stop this from happening in my controller by doing 
something like this:
    form = params[:item]
    if form[:x] == ''''
      form.delete("x")
    end

But that''s not the approach I want to use. I want to disable this 
behavior globally. Basically, for any column that allows nulls, I don''t
want it mentioned in insert and update queries if its value in the form 
is the empty string.

Is there a switch or something to turn on this behavior?
Thanks

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Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

This came up not too long ago, I think the solution was to add a 
before_save to all your models to change blank strings to nil:

class ActiveRecord::Base
  def before_save
    attributes.each do |key, value|
      self[key] = nil if value.blank?
    end
  end
end

I haven''t tested it, but something like that should work.

Cheers, Jonathan.

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Jonathan Viney wrote:
> class ActiveRecord::Base
>   def before_save
>     attributes.each do |key, value|
>       self[key] = nil if value.blank?
>     end
>   end
> end
> 
That appears to work. Thanks.


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