Question

Getting a bit peeved now;

I have a model and a class thats just storing a get request in the database; basic tracking.

class SearchRec(db.Model):
  WebSite = db.StringProperty()#required=True
  WebPage = db.StringProperty()
  CountryNM = db.StringProperty()
  PrefMailing = db.BooleanProperty()
  DateStamp = db.DateTimeProperty(auto_now_add=True)
  IP = db.StringProperty()

class AddSearch(webapp.RequestHandler):
  def get(self):
    searchRec = SearchRec()

    searchRec.WebSite = self.request.get('WEBSITE')
    searchRec.WebPage = self.request.get('WEBPAGE')
    searchRec.CountryNM = self.request.get('COUNTRY')
    searchRec.PrefMailing = bool(self.request.get('MAIL'))
    searchRec.IP = self.request.get('IP')

Bool has my biscuit; I thought that setting bool(self.reque….) would set the type of the string but no matter what I pass it it still stores it as TRUE in the database.
I had the same issue with using required=True on strings for the model; the damn thing kept saying that nothing was being passed… but it had.

Ta

Answer 1

You’ve added a lot of layers of complication to understanding what the bool() build-in function does. Why don’t you test it out directly on the command-line, before embedding it deep in your google app engine code.

What you’d discover is that the bool() function uses python’s truth values:

http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#truth-value-testing

The following values are considered
false:

* None
* False
* zero of any numeric type, for example, 0, 0L, 0.0, 0j.
* any empty sequence, for example, '', (), [].
* any empty mapping, for example, {}.
* instances of user-defined classes, if the class defines a
   `__nonzero__()` or `__len__()` method, when that method returns the integer
   zero or bool value False. [1]

All other values are considered true —
so objects of many types are always
true.

In particular – any non-empty string is True.