Literals don't work well with nil

[octavpo]

If I have a condition in 'where' or 'having' that says

attribute == nil

Squeel translates it nicely into

`attribute` IS NULL

but if I have a literal instead

`attribute` == nil

that's translated into

attribute = NULL

which of course doesn't work right.

[ernie]

It's a literal. It is as literal as possible to what you type. You probably shouldn't be using literals in this case.

[octavpo]

Well, the left side is a literal, I'm not complaining about that, the rest is not. Are there good cases when '== nil' should be translated as '= NULL' rather than 'IS NULL'? I can't think of any, since NULL is not considered a value, but maybe I'm missing something. I'm using this in a 'having' on a computed attribute, unless something changed more recently only literals work there.

[ernie]

You shouldn't be using a literal unless you have no choice. Squeel tries to make fewer assumptions about what you're up to when you have a literal. I'm just giving the rationale for what exists right now -- as I no longer maintain the library, I'll leave it up to current maintainers to decide whether they want to change/maintain that behavior.

[octavpo]

I don't think I have a choice in this case, I tried with a stub and it puts a table name in front of it. Which doesn't work for computed attributes. Is there a way to avoid that other than use a literal? I don't think in the case of nil there's any extra assumption except that you want to test for NULL, which I think needs to always be done with IS.