`SELECT FROM` queries return template error

[Threpio]

Version

1.13.0

What happened?

(Preface: I know I am being a little stupid)

In queries.sql I wrote the following query:

-- name: listlegalsets :many
SELECT FROM legalsets LIMIT 500;

Whilst writing out a large number of basic queries I missed out the Asterisk (*) from the above query. The error that I got from running sqlc generate was the following:

 ✘ theoa@Theos-MacBook-Pro  ~/GolandProjects/awesomeProject2/data  sqlc generate
# package query
error generating code: template: queryCode.tmpl:51:79: executing "queryCodeStd" at <.Ret.DefineType>: error calling DefineType: no type for QueryValue: 

I understand that the error is a simple one as a result of bad SQL but is there any chance this error can be made clearer? (5 mins of my life I wasted to my own stupidity)

I would much prefer if it generated an error message that determined WHICH query was bad:

error generating code: template: error calling DefineType: no type for QueryValue: QueryName: XXX

Relevant log output

error generating code: template: queryCode.tmpl:51:79: executing "queryCodeStd" at <.Ret.DefineType>: error calling DefineType: no type for QueryValue:

Database schema

create table legalsets (
    id uuid not null primary key default gen_random_uuid(),
    name text not null unique
);

SQL queries

-- name: listlegalsets :many
SELECT FROM legalsets LIMIT 500;

Configuration

version: 1
packages:
  - path: "query"
    name: "query"
    engine: "postgresql"
    schema: "schema.sql"
    queries: "queries.sql"

Playground URL

No response

What operating system are you using?

macOS

What database engines are you using?

PostgreSQL

What type of code are you generating?

Go

[akutschera]

The funny thing is that the query statement you wrote is perfeclty legal in Postgres. From the docs:

The list of output expressions after SELECT can be empty, producing a zero-column result table.
This is not valid syntax according to the SQL standard. 
PostgreSQL allows it to be consistent with allowing zero-column tables.

So the error seems to be that you wrote something correct and the generator could not handle it. However, from your description I think that you expect this select statement to be an error and want to be notified.

If (and that's a big if) that generator error would be corrected, you would end up with a query that returns a list of empty structs. I don't see a use case for this (at least not in sqlc). OTOH, the current error message is not helpful to a user, but returning an error when a legal select statement is submitted is not cool, either.

So before fixing this, we need to decide what the expected outcome should be.

[kyleconroy]

As @akutschera, this is a completely valid SQL query. It will return an empty row. This shouldn't result in an error.