Comments on: Take Control of your Field Values with nilify_blanks

By: benhughes

benhughes — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 16:28:10 +0000

By default columns are nil anyways, so :default => nil is really unnecessary. What this plugin solves is when a form is submitted with a blank value which explicitly gets set as so in the database. For example if your params hash is:

{ :name => “Project A”, :description => “” }

Perhaps you really want the “description” field to be NULL in the database and not “” as it will be by default.

By: Gavin Hughes

Gavin Hughes — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:29:03 +0000

Nice work, Ben. Exactly what I was looking for.

By: Julio Capote

Julio Capote — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:41:34 +0000

Perhaps I’m confused, but what’s wrong with just having :default => nil? in your migrations?

By: benhughes

benhughes — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:21:28 +0000

Ah great catch – I’ve changed the plugin to only activate if the table exists. Thanks!

By: Andreas

Andreas — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:50:06 +0000

I was looking for exactly this behavior and it is really working well in general. Unfortunately, I ran into a catch 22 situation. When running my migrations, I get the following error – tables don’t exist yet. Only commenting the nilify_blanks line gets me passed this issue. Here is the relevant stack trace fragment:

Mysql::Error: Table ‘ll_prd.organizations’ doesn’t exist: SHOW FIELDS FROM `organizations`
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.2.2/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract_adapter.rb:188:in `log’
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.2.2/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql_adapter.rb:309:in `execute’
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.2.2/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql_adapter.rb:440:in `columns’
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.2.2/lib/active_record/base.rb:1220:in `columns’
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.2.2/lib/active_record/base.rb:1239:in `content_columns’
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/railsgarden-nilify_blanks-0.1.1/lib/nilify_blanks.rb:24:in `nilify_blanks’

By: benhughes

benhughes — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:22:53 +0000

Looks like there was a problem with this working in gem mode; this should be solved and now working as of the latest version (0.1.1) – just update the gem and it should work now.

By: gindogg

gindogg — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:12:53 +0000

I followed the readme install instructions and the gem shows up when I run “gem list.” However, I receive “undefined local variable or method `nilify_blanks’”. Not sure what I’m missing.

By: Ed W

Ed W — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:22:26 +0000

Better also to remove the trinary logic and make fields NOT NULL unless it’s particularly useful…

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:28:40 +0000

Another plugin for doing this is strip_attributes

By: benhughes

benhughes — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:17:35 +0000

Jay – if you use this plugin on your model, by default all fields that respond to blank? and return true for it will be converted to nils. Any fields that can “legitimately” be blank must be excepted from the columns like this: nilify_blanks :except => [:can_be_blank].

Also, to be clear, *all* the fields that get converted are checked upon every save, regardless of whether a value has or has not been set. In other words if you have a blank field in the model then have a form that does *not* include that field (hence no key provided for it in update_attributes, for example), that blank field will still be converted to nil. It works as a before_save filter, not by overriding the mutators.