Re: NULL value vs. DEFAULT value.

On Tue, March 8, 2011 10:09, Scott Ribe wrote:
> On Mar 8, 2011, at 7:54 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
>
>> My question is:  Why am I getting a NULL exception?
>
> Because you're trying to insert NULL explicitly?

Yes, that is the problem.  Evidently RoR's ActiveRecord helpfully
converts a string containing nought but spaces to nil when a numeric
value is required for the column type. The problem arises with a
single unit record received from the government system that has a
UOM code provided but the associated decimal value field is blank.

Since the default is zero in our DB I have altered our load program
to coerce a value of zero for strings containing only spaces
destined for numeric columns.  But, it feels ugly.  I would really
like to be able to coerce nils to some value on a column by column
basis on the DBMS side.  This is not really a DEFAULT value and I do
not know what I would call it if such a thing did exist.  I suppose
a trigger and function is called for.

Thanks for the help.

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