JSON API mixes null and empty strings for missing URLs

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#422 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
api

Research direction

Start by tracing the API serialization for list_archive_url, webscm_url, and the other nullable URL fields mentioned in the issue. Determine whether the null-versus-empty behavior is controlled by DRF or Patchwork, then verify that nullable URLs consistently produce null and that the behavior is covered by the relevant API tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

api bug

This is in quite a few places.

list_archive_url is null (though it can be "" too! not sure what the correlation is), most other nullable URLs i.e. webscm_url are "".

I believe the best option is to have them all be null, avoiding cases where a JSON parser knows a field should contain a URL, finds a value (since it's not null), and can't parse it as a valid URL.

Also not sure if this is a DRF quirk or something Patchwork can control.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
317
Forks
91
No merged PRs in 30d

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