Rails-3 Spurious NULL columns on INSERT

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have a model in whose migration I have defined a datetime column that both has a default value and sets null to false. As this is a PostgreSQL database the default value is 'infinity', which may be the source of the difficulty.

When I attempt to save this model ActiveRecord produces an SQL statement that explicitly sets this column to NULL thus both defeating the purpose of the default value and triggering the NOT NULL constraint on the DBMS.

How does one turn off or override this behaviour? What I want to happen is that model_instance.save will only specify columns that have values set and will simply not include any column that does not have an explicit value set.

I can see that for other attributes ActiveRecord is setting things to the defaults provided in the migration. Is this the case? If not then where is ActiveRecord getting this information? And why bother? The purpose of a default value on a database column is to have the DBMS provide for the absence of information at the DBMS level. If I wish to do that at the attribute level then I can do so in the model class itself.

2

It sounds like you default of “infinity” is not being honored at all. Most likely because it is not a valid datetime and ActiveRecord doesn’t know what to set it as. In irb if you create a new instance of that model (model.new) you should see all the default values set. If you are not seeing one for datetime then “infinity” is not being honored as a valid datetime. I would suggest changing “infinity” to a datetime that is 50 years into the future.

Good luck.

B.