Can't run South migration to add a PhoneNumberField

[jeffbowen]

I'm adding a PhoneNumberField field (with blank=True) to an existing model. As such, when I run ./manage schemamigration --auto myapp, South demands that I provide a default value for the column it will be adding. If I set the default (either in models.py or as a one-off in the South migration) to "" (an empty string), when I try to run the migration I get an AttributeError:

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'as_e164'

This is because in get_prep_value, the first if block is passed (since "" does not equal None) and the to_python function changes value from "" to None so when line 67 is hit, we get the AttributeError.

If I try setting the default to None, I then get an IntegrityError:

django.db.utils.IntegrityError: column "phone_number" contains null values

As the Django docs recommend and as mentioned in issue 1, we should use an empty string, not null, to represent a blank value for a CharField (which PhoneNumberField is under the hood). As such, although adding null=True to the field definition in my models makes the migration succeed, it leads to trouble down the road as you can end up with both "" and None as null values.

Not sure exactly how or where you'd like to change things but the request is that it be possible to have South work properly when defining a PhoneNumberField with blank=True. Let me know if I'm misunderstanding something here. Thanks!

[saadbinakhlaq]

not fixed :(

[MattBlack85]

same here while running migrate command

[ApsOps]

@stefanfoulis Hi! Do you plan to merge the fix PR soon?

[LennyLip]

same error, if we try to get instance with no char: like

Phone.objects.get(phone=8909999999)

or just

Phone.objects.get(phone=1)