What is this for?

By default the xml serialization of rails always returns a tag with the attribute nil='true' when the attributes value is nil.

<person>
  <id>1</id>
  <first_name>Florian</first_name>
  <last_name nil='true' />
</person>

when you use the nil_skipper gem the output will look like this:

<person>
  <id>1</id>
  <first_name>Florian</first_name>
</person>

(All attributes with the value nil will be skipped completely)

Installation

gem install nil_skipper