How to test pact with null data

Question

I am aware of that PACT expects provider data need to be in our control, but I am facing following situation I have pact contract for multiple consumers, all have some mandatory attribute and some are optional attribute, but business logic suppress all the attribute which are having null value, but according to contract I would still be needing that value as null, what should I do for it? Edit 1: i.e let's say below my contract looks

consumer sent request with below params:

{ "method": "GET", "path" : "/pathOfApi", "headers":{ "accept": "json" } }

Provider responds with below data:

{ "Status": 200,
"body" :[
{"country" : "string",
"countryId" :"string",
"postalcode": "string",
"addressLine1" :"string",
"addressLine2" : "string"
"customerName" : "string",
"customerId" : "string"
}
]

now not all customer has address line 2, now in production if addressLine 2 is null it won't be present in output of api, but for our contract field should be present with null

Answer 1

If your provider does not return a field, but the consumer is expecting null, then either the consumer needs to change their expectation (because it's incorrect) or the provider should update its implementation to return null values.

Just because a consumer asks for something doesn't mean you need to do it!

If in some instances the field is present and other it is not, you need to write two tests to cover each case. I'd suggest covering one case with all of the fields, and another with the minimum set of fields (see https://docs.pact.io/faq/#why-is-there-no-support-for-specifying-optional-attributes).