From ad6ce1e6f99a6427a4c01a175d72f21cd28f816a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Ian Kelly Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 20:21:22 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] Clarified documentation regarding Oracle's treatment of nulls and empty strings. git-svn-id: http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk@9976 bcc190cf-cafb-0310-a4f2-bffc1f526a37 --- docs/ref/databases.txt | 13 +++++++------ docs/ref/models/fields.txt | 4 ++-- 2 files changed, 9 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-) diff --git a/docs/ref/databases.txt b/docs/ref/databases.txt index c2d3cffbfb..153a0a16f7 100644 --- a/docs/ref/databases.txt +++ b/docs/ref/databases.txt @@ -475,12 +475,13 @@ characters of the truncated name with a repeatable MD5 hash value. NULL and empty strings ---------------------- -Django generally prefers to use the empty string ('') rather than NULL, but -Oracle treats both identically. To get around this, the Oracle backend -coerces the ``null=True`` option on fields that permit the empty string as a -value. When fetching from the database, it is assumed that a NULL value in -one of these fields really means the empty string, and the data is silently -converted to reflect this assumption. +Django generally prefers to use the empty string ('') rather than +NULL, but Oracle treats both identically. To get around this, the +Oracle backend coerces the ``null=True`` option on fields that have +the empty string as a possible value. When fetching from the database, +it is assumed that a NULL value in one of these fields really means +the empty string, and the data is silently converted to reflect this +assumption. ``TextField`` limitations ------------------------- diff --git a/docs/ref/models/fields.txt b/docs/ref/models/fields.txt index 63018f6611..4643837841 100644 --- a/docs/ref/models/fields.txt +++ b/docs/ref/models/fields.txt @@ -54,8 +54,8 @@ string, not ``NULL``. .. note:: When using the Oracle database backend, the ``null=True`` option will be - coerced for string-based fields that can blank, and the value ``NULL`` will - be stored to denote the empty string. + coerced for string-based fields that have the empty string as a possible + value, and the value ``NULL`` will be stored to denote the empty string. ``blank`` ---------