Private Issues: Consistent Nullable Fields #453

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opened 2026-03-09 16:25:56 +00:00 by nphilipp · 1 comment

nphilipp commented

2026-03-09 16:25:56 +00:00

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Storytime

As a Forgejo developer or community contributor,
I want that nullable DB fields are expressed in a consistent way,
to avoid that using different ways confuse me.

As a Forgejo contributor,
I want that pointers are used sparingly,
to reduce the risk of attempting to dereference nil pointers.

Acceptance Criteria

IssueId, PrivateIssueID style pairs of database fields use sql.NullInt64 types instead of pointers
Migration scripts are adapted accordingly
Unit and integration tests finish successfully

Background

I only now noticed that other tables with nullable fields use sql.Null* types instead of pointers to express that a field can be null (and won’t be set to 0 on insertion if unspecified like with the non-pointer type). Additional advantages are a) that these can’t be nil, preventing crashes when naïvely accessing NULL values, and b) these types allow to distinguish between the null-value of the type and a NULL in the table column.

# Storytime As a Forgejo developer or community contributor, I want that nullable DB fields are expressed in a consistent way, to avoid that using different ways confuse me. As a Forgejo contributor, I want that pointers are used sparingly, to reduce the risk of attempting to dereference `nil` pointers. # Acceptance Criteria - [x] `IssueId`, `PrivateIssueID` style pairs of database fields use `sql.NullInt64` types instead of pointers - [x] Migration scripts are adapted accordingly - [x] Unit and integration tests finish successfully # Background I only now noticed that other tables with nullable fields use `sql.Null*` types instead of pointers to express that a field can be null (and won’t be set to `0` on insertion if unspecified like with the non-pointer type). Additional advantages are a) that these can’t be `nil`, preventing crashes when naïvely accessing NULL values, and b) these types allow to distinguish between the null-value of the type and a NULL in the table column.