Editing in the admin makes None into ''

[Ram Rachum]

Hey all,

I just stumbled into an annoying behavior of Django that I don't know how to handle.

I discovered that when you edit a model in the Django admin, and one of its text field's value is `None`, it'll be saved as the empty string u'' instead of `None`.

This makes sense from the HTML implementation point-of-view, because the form is a text field, and if it has nothing in it, that usually means u''. But it's really annoying from the Django point-of-view, because now I have some objects with a value of u'' and some with `None`! This is causing bugs in some of my queries.

Any idea what to do about this?

Thanks,

Ram.

[Emanuel Ilyayev]

The docs says:

Avoid using null on string-based fields such as CharField and TextField unless you have an excellent reason. If a string-based field has null=True, that means it has two possible values for “no data”: NULL, and the empty string. In most cases, it’s redundant to have two possible values for “no data;” Django convention is to use the empty string, not NULL.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/fields/#null

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[Ram Rachum]

Thanks Emanuel!

I think this is a bit of an ugly solution, since None seems to me like a more perfect representation of "Nothing" than the empty string. But since this is the Django convention, I'll go with it.

Thanks!