Question

I find that when I insert nothing of a string form field through a form it captures it as an empty string ''.

However when I insert nothing of an integer form field through a form it captures it as [null].

Is this good practice? Should the string be null as well in the db?

Answer 1

It is good practice. If strings were allowed to be null, there would be two ways to have an empty string: null and "". This gives you multiple values to check against, which is inefficient and messy.

This is a Django convention, but is good practice in all applications, unless you have the need for null to mean something different than "".