Rails ActiveRecord doesn't seem to handle null values correctly in the test enviornment

Question

Everything seems to work well in the development and production environments:

> script/console
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.8)
ruby-1.8.7-p302 > Tape.find(:first, :conditions => "deleted_at is not null").deleted_at.nil?
 => false 
ruby-1.8.7-p302 > Tape.find(:first, :conditions => "deleted_at is null").deleted_at.nil?
 => true

So why am I getting the exact opposite results in the test environment?

> script/console test
Loading test environment (Rails 2.3.8)
ruby-1.8.7-p302 > Tape.find(:first, :conditions => "deleted_at is not null").deleted_at.nil?
 => true

Searching for deleted_at is null never returns any records in the test environment, even when some calls have deleted_at = nil and some have a timestamp there.

Here's a partial readout of the mysql table:

mysql> describe tapes;
+-----------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field           | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+-----------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id              | int(11)      | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
...
| deleted_at      | datetime     | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+-----------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

Does anyone know what's going on? Is this a bug?

Answer 1

So it turns out that the method I was using to create null values in my fixture was incorrect. It seems that if you want a real null value from a csv fixture is to have that field default to null and just don't include that column in your csv. Hopefully this will help someone else :)

Answer 2

Are your test and production databases both MySQL or is the test database SQLite? Some databases (like SQLite) may treat a null value the same as an empty string, so you want to use blank? instead of nil?.