You can do that, but you're fixing the symptom rather than the problem. The data-model was designed with the assumption that the empty fields would have nulls, so there might be other points in the code that fail due to the incorrect insertion of empty strings. Fixing the insertion points would allow the data model to function as intended and it would probably be less work in the long run. In any event I'll take a look at it later and see if I can track it down.
