{}[http://travis-ci.org/rubiety/nilify_blanks]

== 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.

By default, columns set as NOT NULL will not be nilified, since that value cannot be persisted, and it might be better to catch that with a validation. If you want to nilify those columns anyway, you can use only: (see below) to explicitly mention them.

Only attributes responding to blank? 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:

== Requirements

As of v1.4.0, this gem requires Rails 4 and Ruby 2.2 or higher.

== Install

Include the gem using bundler in your Gemfile:

gem "nilify_blanks"

== Basic Usage

Checks and converts all content fields in the model

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base nilify_blanks end

Checks and converts only text fields in the model

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base nilify_blanks types: [:text] 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

Checks and converts any fields, regardless of their null constraint

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base nilify_blanks nullables_only: false end

== Global Usage

You can also apply nilify_blanks to all models inheriting from ActiveRecord::Base:

ActiveRecord::Base.nilify_blanks

Or perhaps just a model namespace base class:

Inventory::Base.nilify_blanks

== Specifying a Callback

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

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

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base nilify_blanks before: :validation_on_update end

== RSpec Matcher

First, include the matchers:

require "nilify_blanks/matchers"

To ensure for a given column:

describe City do it { should nilify_blanks_for(:name) } end

To ensure for all applicable content columns:

describe City do it { should nilify_blanks } end

You can optionally match on options also:

describe City do it { should nilify_blanks_for(:name, before: :create) } end

describe City do it { should nilify_blanks(before: :create) } 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:

$rake appraisal install$ rake appraisal test