On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 3:39 PM, Tom Lane <[email protected]> wrote:

> Andrew Dunstan <[email protected]> writes:
> > On 08/29/2015 08:47 AM, Shulgin, Oleksandr wrote:
> >> Given there were no loud complaints about this, the current behavior
> >> is appropriate for most users, the rest can still work around using
> >> coalesce(to_json(...), json 'null').
>
> > I don't think it's necessarily more correct. But I do agree that it's
> > not a good idea to change the behaviour unless there is major
> > unhappiness with it.
>
> I'm not entirely convinced that JSON NULL and SQL NULL should be treated
> as the same concept, so I would say that the current behavior is fine ---
> at least when you think about it in isolation.  However, haven't we
> already bought into that equivalence in these examples?
>
> regression=# select row_to_json(row(1,null,2));
>         row_to_json
> ---------------------------
>  {"f1":1,"f2":null,"f3":2}
> (1 row)
>
> regression=# select array_to_json(array[1,null,2]);
>  array_to_json
> ---------------
>  [1,null,2]
> (1 row)
>
> or even in to_json itself:
>
> regression=# select to_json(array[1,null,2]);
>   to_json
> ------------
>  [1,null,2]
> (1 row)
>
> The scalar case is definitely failing to be consistent with these.
>

Yes, that's my argument for correctness also: to_json() on a composite
object should behave like distribution of to_json() calls over object/array
elements.


> Is consistency a sufficient reason to change it?
>

Not for me.

--
Alex

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