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Nilify Blanks

In Rails when saving a model from a form and values are not provided by the user, an empty string is recorded to the database instead of a NULL as many would prefer (mixing blanks and NULLs can become confusing). This plugin allows you to specify a list of attributes (or exceptions from all the attributes) that will be converted to nil if they are blank before a model is saved.

Only attributes responding to empty? with a value of true will be converted to nil. Therefore, this does not work with integer fields with the value of 0, for example. Usage is best shown through examples:

Install

Include the gem using bundler in your Gemfile:

  gem "nilify_blanks"

Basic Examples

# Checks and converts all fields in the model
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  nilify_blanks
end

# Checks and converts only the title and author fields
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  nilify_blanks :only => [:author, :title]
end

# Checks and converts all fields except for title and author
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  nilify_blanks :except => [:author, :title]
end

Specifying a Callback

Checking uses an ActiveRecord before_save filter by default, but you can specify a different filter with the :before option. Any filter will work - just first remove the “before_” prefix from the name.

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  nilify_blanks :before => :create
end

class Post < ActiveRecord::Before
  nilify_blanks :before => :validation_on_update
end

Running Tests

This gem uses appraisal to test with different versions of the dependencies. See Appraisal first for which versions are tested, then run to test all appraisals:

$ rake appraisal test