Rails - Boolean field not saved on PostgreSQL / Heroku

Question

Got a strange problem:

Boolean field not getting saved on Heroku (works fine locally)

Details:

  Rails 2.3 on Heroku (bamboo-ree-1.8.7).

Migration

  def self.up
   add_column :users, :send_contact_emails, :boolean, :default => false
  end

On Heroku:

>> u = User.last
=> #<User id: 100, ......
>> u.send_contact_emails = true
=> true
>> u.save
=> true

>> x = User.last
=> #<User id: 100, ...
>> x.send_contact_emails
=> nil  <---------------------------- Why is this ?

When I do this locally (Postgresql 8.4), it works as expected.

Any ideas ?

EDIT:

Ran some tests directly on the DB:

>> ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("SELECT send_contact_emails from users where id = 100")[0]
=> {"send_contact_emails"=>nil}

>> ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("UPDATE users SET send_contact_emails=FALSE where id=100")
=> #<PGresult:0x7f76d7593580>

>> ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("SELECT send_contact_emails from users where id = 100")[0]
=> {"send_contact_emails"=>"f"}

So the problem is with Rails and not Postgresql...

Answer 1

Looks like the problem was on the RAILS side.

Once I manually updated the values to false:

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("UPDATE users SET send_contact_emails=FALSE")

The problem disappeared.

(As if rails 2.3.10 was unable to handle 'nil' in boolean fields..)