cl-postgres convert nil to false

[Julien Danjou]

Hi there,

I'm dealing with a problem and I'd like some enlightenment.

I've a table with text columns that can't be NULL.
In my Lisp program, sometimes I'm assigning `nil' as value for this
column, either via a direct query execution or via the DAO. What I
would expect in this case, is to PostgreSQL to raise an error.

But this does not happen.

What happens is that (cl-postgres:to-sql-string nil) returns "false",
and that the query is built to:

  INSERT INTO mytable (mytextfield) VALUES (false);

PostgreSQL implicit type conversion kicks in and insert the string
'false' into the field, which does not trigger an error since this it
not NULL.

The obvious fix here is to patch all my code to convert nil to :null,
but this is a pain. I don't want to do the type checking I'm doing with
PostgreSQL one more time in my application.

What I'd like is for cl-postgres to consider nil as being NULL.
The boolean false value could be mapped as :false, which would also make
sure no code is inserting false just because a value is actually nil.

The change is pretty trivial and I'm running with it right now, which
allowed me to debug a lot of implicit nil conversion to 'false' in text
fields.

I recognize this is something that would break compatibility, so that
might be enabled via a defparameter or something.

Does that sounds like a good idea, or do I miss an obvious problem?

-- 
Julien Danjou
;; Free Software hacker ; freelance consultant
;; http://julien.danjou.info
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