Laravel eloquent nullable unique constraint

[maxxd]

Hi y'all. In my attendees table the attendee_code field must be unique if it is known - if not, we pretend it's fine and move on. I know that it's not the greatest idea in terms of data integrity, but given the business rules I have to work with, it is what it is. The only problem is that I'm getting a duplicate entry exception when a new record is entered into the DB with a null attendee_code if any other record has a null attendee_code. MySQL allows this, so I'm thinking this must be an eloquent thing - does anyone know what I'm missing?

    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('attendees', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->id();
            $table->timestamps();
            $table->string('first_name');
            $table->string('last_name');
            $table->string('specialty');
            $table->string('attendee_code')->nullable();
            $table->string('npi_id')->nullable();
            $table->string('address_1')->nullable();
            $table->string('city')->nullable();
            $table->string('state')->nullable();
            $table->string('zip_code')->nullable();
            $table->unique('attendee_code');
        });
    }

 

Edited August 28, 2021 by maxxd
forgot to add the migration

[maxxd]

You know those times where explaining your issue gets you to think about it a different way and you immediately solve your problem? Yeah.

For anyone that happens across this with a similar issue, the problem was that the value being inserted was '', not null. So the duplicate entry was actually valid. I created a mutator in the model to return an actual null value if the attendee_code is empty, and everything works as expected now.

Thanks again to this forum for being my eternal rubber ducky.