Parameters and NULL - r

Question

I'm having trouble passing NULL as an INSERT parameter query using RPostgres and RPostgreSQL:
In PostgreSQL:
create table foo (ival int, tval text, bval bytea);
In R:
This works:
res <- dbSendQuery(con, "INSERT INTO foo VALUES($1, $2, $3)",
params=list(ival=1,
tval= 'not quite null',
bval=charToRaw('asdf')
)
)
But this throws an error:
res <- dbSendQuery(con, "INSERT INTO foo VALUES($1, $2, $3)",
params=list(ival=NULL,
tval= 'not quite null',
bval=charToRaw('asdf')
)
)
Using RPostgres, the error message is:
Error: expecting a string
Under RPostgreSQL, the error is:
Error in postgresqlExecStatement(conn, statement, ...) :
RS-DBI driver: (could not Retrieve the result : ERROR: invalid input
syntax for integer: "NULL"
)
Substituting NA would be fine with me, but it isn't a work-around - a literal 'NA' gets written to the database.
Using e.g. integer(0) gives the same "expecting a string" message.

Answer 1

You can use NULLIF directly in your insert statement:
res <- dbSendQuery(con, "INSERT INTO foo VALUES(NULLIF($1, 'NULL')::integer, $2, $3)",
params=list(ival=NULL,
tval= 'not quite null',
bval=charToRaw('asdf')
)
)
works with NA as well.

Answer 2

One option here to workaround the problem of not knowing how to articulate a NULL value in R which the PostgresSQL pacakge will be able to successfully translate is to simply not specify the column whose value you want to be NULL in the database.
So in your example you could use this:
res <- dbSendQuery(con, "INSERT INTO foo (col2, col3) VALUES($1, $2)",
params=list(tval = 'not quite null',
bval = charToRaw('asdf')
)
)
when you want col1 to have a NULL value. This of course assumes that col1 in your table is nullable, which may not be the case.

Answer 3

Thanks all for the help. Tim's answer is a good one, and I used it to catch the integer values. I went a different route for the rest of it, writing a function in PostgreSQL to handle most of this. It looks roughly like:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION add_stuff(ii integer, tt text, bb bytea)
RETURNS integer
AS
$$
DECLARE
bb_comp bytea;
rows integer;
BEGIN
bb_comp = convert_to('NA', 'UTF8'); -- my database is in UTF8.
-- front-end catches ii is NA; RPostgres blows up
-- trying to convert 'NA' to integer.
tt = nullif(tt, 'NA');
bb = nullif(bb, bb_comp);
INSERT INTO foo VALUES (ii, tt, bb);
GET DIAGNOSTICS rows = ROW_COUNT;
RETURN rows;
END;
$$
LANGUAGE plpgsql VOLATILE;
Now to have a look at the RPostgres source and see if there's an easy-enough way to make it handle NULL / NA a bit more easily. Hoping that it's missing because nobody thought of it, not because it's super-tricky. :)
This will give the "wrong" answer if someone is trying to put literally 'NA' into the database and mean something other than NULL / NA (e.g. NA = "North America"); given our use case, that seems very unlikely. We'll see in six months time.