BlanketyBlank

Conundrum:

Pesky empty strings getting into your database? It makes querying and reporting a hassle, and no one wants that.

Solution:

This gem.

BlanketyBlank sets designated blank values on ActiveRecord models to nil before validation. Simple, no black boxes.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'blankety_blank'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install blankety_blank

Usage

Designate attributes with nilify_before_validation. If using STI, do this on your base class.

class Company < ActiveRecord::Base
  include BlanketyBlank
  nilify_before_validation :name, :phone
end

class Vendor < Company; end

vendor = Vendor.new(name: "Foo", phone: " ")
vendor.validate
vendor.name   # "Foo"
vendor.phone  # nil

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake rspec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/uberllama/blankety_blank.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.