Hi All,
Something happened since early December with either Pro or AGOL. We have a feature service that gets updated on monthly-ish interval using the 'Overwrite Web Layer' button in ArcPro. The polygon layer getting published has multiple INT and STRING fields where 'Allow Null=True' and many of the features have NULL values. This was all fine and dandy when we last ran the update on 12/6/23. Today when we ran the update, all the null values are converted to something explicit. INT values are now 0, STRING values are now 'empty string'. This basically broke our application code that expects NULL as well as symbols, query and everything else where NULLs were expected. WTF? Luckily we caught this in a TEST version before deploying to PROD.
How do we get the data to publish as NULL?
Screen shot of a REST endpoint query for the same data on the PROD (nulls correct) and TEST (nulls converted to 0):
I ran a few other publish tests to verify it's not just the 'overwrite' and get the same results. Here's screen shot from Pro of the features being published (source gdb) and the gdb that's extracted from the .SD file uploaded during the publish process. The nulls are being converted sometime in the 'publishing process'