Several field mappers have a null_value parameter, that allows you to specify a placeholder
value to insert into a document if the incoming value for that field is null. The default value
for this is always null, meaning "add no placeholder". However, we explicitly bar users from
setting this parameter directly to null (done in #7978, in order to fix an NPE).
This exclusion means that if a mapper is serialized with include_defaults, then we either need
to special-case null_value to ensure that it is not output when it holds the default value, or
we find that the resulting serialized form cannot be used to create a mapping. This stops us
doing some useful generic testing of mappers.
This commit permits null as a parameter value for null_value, and changes the tests to check
that it is a) permissible and b) applied without throwing errors. As part of the testing changes,
a new base class MapperServiceTestCase is refactored from MapperTestCase, holding
the various helper methods related to building mappings but not the single-mapper specific
abstract methods.
Closes#58823
d59343b4ba