Update what Ecto considers nil / empty

The Ecto library ships with a Changeset module to assist with make changes to our database safely. Out of the box the cast/4 will consider blank strings and nil to be empty values. You can add to the list of values the changeset will consider empty using the empty_values: option. In practice that looks like:

params = %{"title" => "Movie Review", "author" => "NULL"}

changeset = cast(%Post{}, params, [:title, :author], empty_values: ["", "NULL"]) 

changeset.changes
#=> %{title: "Movie Review"} 

In this example we added “NULL” to the empty values list and when we casted params the “author” key matched the “NULL” value so it was filtered out.