Jetpack: Search: Customizer not correctly saving options on first change

[gibrown]

We've had periodic reports of this, and I think I was able to reproduce it. It only happens when the option being changed is not yet in the DB. So for instance if the 'jetpack_search_show_powered_by' option is not yet in the DB, then we are unable to set the option to false because update_option() in Core checks to see what the current setting is with get_option(). get_option() returns false because it doesn't exist, and then update_option() doesn't think it has anything to do: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/src/wp-includes/option.php#L405

I guess we should be setting the value to '0' rather than false https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/blob/aa1eedce7d7b90b5a943969e0b49ebdd9708f2f1/modules/search/class-jetpack-search-customize.php#L264

There have been a bunch of HE reports around this.

[jsnmoon]

I'm able to reproduce this. Your explanation seems to be spot on.

I guess we should be setting the value to '0' rather than false (@gibrown)

Do you know where we're setting the value to false? I dug quite a bit into the Customizer code but was never able to find out where we serialize input values to be stored in the codebase.

[gibrown]

Do you know where we're setting the value to false? I dug quite a bit into the Customizer code but was never able to find out where we serialize input values to be stored in the codebase.

I spent hours hunting around for this last week also. I think that by default it returns false. I can think of two solutions:

1. Invert the selections. "Hide Powered by" rather than "Show". Backwards compatibility may be an issue and I guess requires a new option.
2. Add a custom sanitization function that converts the values to be '0' or '1'.