Hi all, On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 00:05 -0700, Jeff Anderson wrote: > Malcolm Tredinnick wrote: > > I don't think we'd want to get too subtle here. Either it makes > sense > > for all non-text fields, or it doesn't. > Agreed– I simply haven't spent any time thinking about this particular > problem in respect to any field other than an IntegerField. I can't > think of any non-text field that it may not make sense with. >
This blank + null think tends to bug me too. BUT, I can think of one situation were ALL fields would ideally have blanks. In fact, I've long wanted a linux system-wide configuration database with support for it. That situation is when you have hierarchical/cascading settings, with local settings overriding network-wide settings. For example, let's say you want every machine on a network to use a particular mailserver. You would specify its address, once, in a global config variable. However, in a smaller LAN workgroup (say, accounts dept.) you might want to clear that variable, so the mail program's built-in default is used instead. How do you clear it? Specify the variable for the workgroup, but leave its value blank. Note that this doesn't apply to just strings: it applies to any conceivable datatype that you might want to have locally and globally. The most commonly seen case of it is the "tri-state checkbox", where you have "checked", "unchecked", and "default" states. It comes up in different programs from time to time, and not just for network configs. You might see it in settings trees, for example, if one desktop's wallpaper should be scaled to fit the screen (the default), but the rest should be tiled. NOW... having said that, I don't know if it's even possible to use django's blank argument in this way, for all datatypes. If not, then I certainly think the current need to specify it is useless, and should be fixed, so the above is possible. -- Lee Braiden http://irukado.org > My religion is simple: my religion is kindness. -- Dalai Lama --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
