[jrockway]

I don't have general advice, but you do have 3 states to represent there; not acted upon by user, yes, and no. That's what enums are.

I think "we'll pass in a pointer to the actual data and if it's unset the pointer won't point to a valid memory location" is a weird pattern that the industry should probably stop doing. So no *bool type here.

Database nulls are maybe reasonable, but mean many things that an explicit enum doesn't. "This column was added after the fact and we didn't want to set a default value", "this column is optional", etc. The more ambiguous the meaning, the more mistakes that can be made.

(I think someone is going to say, "don't write the form to the database until it's valid", but you have to have some way to save work in progress between website visits or "my Internet died", right? If you just dump a JSON blob in local storage, you still have the same representation problem; the field has 3 possible values, and you can't just pretend like it only has two because there is a built-in type that has two possible values.)