Nice way to set attributes to nil if blank

I've got a form for editing a model called Property. Property has two fields, web_color and thumbnail_path, that are nil by default, and the model has some behaviour to generate defaults for them when nil, which is the usual case.

When the form is submitted, the text fields for these attributes come through as empty strings, and so these attributes are changed to be empty strings instead of nil.

I can think of some hacky ways to stop this, such as doing something like this in the controller:

params[:property][:web_color] = nil if params[:property][:web_color].blank?

But, it would be better if this behaviour lived in the model. One way would be to set up a before_save callback like this:

before_save :set_nils

def set_nils   self.web_color = nil if self.web_color.blank?   self.thumbnail_path = nil if self.thumbnail_path.blank? end

But, this feels kind of hacky and i'd like a cleaner way. Can anyone show me one?

thanks max

In your model do

def web_color(web_color)   web_color = nil if web_color.blank?   write_attribute(:web_color, web_color) end

and the same for thumbnail_path

Andrew Timberlake http://ramblingsonrails.com

http://MyMvelope.com - The SIMPLE way to manage your savings

Sorry, I did mean web_color=(...

Andrew Timberlake http://ramblingsonrails.com

http://MyMvelope.com - The SIMPLE way to manage your savings

BTW, this seems like the sort of behaviour that one might want to have quite often in a model, to prevent form submission from changing 'nil' to "". Maybe i'll put it into a macro, i'll post up my code here if i do.

cheers max

BTW, this seems like the sort of behaviour that one might want to have quite often in a model, to prevent form submission from changing 'nil' to "". Maybe i'll put it into a macro, i'll post up my code here if i do.

I don't recall the name, but there is a plugin on agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins that does this automatically.

This may have been it... looks like it will do what you want in any case.

http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/stripattributes

-philip

Philip Hallstrom wrote:

BTW, this seems like the sort of behaviour that one might want to have quite often in a model, to prevent form submission from changing 'nil' to "". Maybe i'll put it into a macro, i'll post up my code here if i do.

I don't recall the name, but there is a plugin on agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins that does this automatically.

This may have been it... looks like it will do what you want in any case.

http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/stripattributes

-philip

Nice - thanks for that philip!