null pointer overrides not working

I'm not sure and I might be missing something, but null overrides at least for timestamp to *time.Time, doesn't seem to wok, text, to *string works.

I've also tried with timestamptz, timestamp(0), timestamp without time zone I'm unable to debug this as the go compiler fails when building debug version in Goland with OOM.. it seems that 8G of free ram is not enough.

edit: , jsonb to *json.RawMessage kinda works.. it generates two imports "encoding/json" and json "encoding/json"

version: "1"
packages:
  - name: "db"
#....
overrides:
  - db_type: "timestamp"
    go_type:
      import: "time"
      package: "time"
      type: "Time"
      pointer: true
    nullable: true
  - db_type: "jsonb"
    go_type:
      import: "encoding/json"
      package: "json"
      type: "RawMessage"
      pointer: true
    nullable: true

CREATE TABLE office (
    id_office bigint NOT NULL GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY,

    created_at timestamp(0) DEFAULT now() NOT NULL,
    updated_at timestamp(0),
);

-- name: ListOffices :many
SELECT * FROM office
ORDER BY name;

This always generates

type Office struct {
	IDOffice    int64
	CreatedAt   time.Time
	UpdatedAt   sql.NullTime
}

Meh.. this seems to somewhat work but it's tedious and almost impossible to guess.

  - db_type: "pg_catalog.timestamp"
    go_type:
      import: "time"
      type: "Time"
      pointer: true
    nullable: true

  - db_type: "pg_catalog.int2"
    go_type:
      type: "int16"
      pointer: true
    nullable: true
  - db_type: "pg_catalog.int4"
    go_type:
      type: "int"
      pointer: true
    nullable: true
  - db_type: "pg_catalog.int8"
    go_type:
      type: "int64"
      pointer: true
    nullable: true
  - db_type: "pg_catalog.bool"
    go_type:
      type: "bool"
      pointer: true
    nullable: true
  - db_type: "pg_catalog.float4"
    go_type:
      type: "float32"
      pointer: true
    nullable: true
  - db_type: "pg_catalog.float8"
    go_type:
      type: "float64"
      pointer: true
    nullable: true

@mvrhov

hmm I am trying to use this and its not working for me. Anything tricky you did here @mvrhov? In particular, I cant get timestamps to work.

@jskelcy

@jskelcy Are you saying, that the config one post above yours doesn't work for you?

@mvrhov

I should have updated here. But I found my issue, essentially the params object which are generated for a function dont seem to respect overrides in some cases. The tables themselves were being generated with the right types. I was able to come up with a workaround, I outline it in sort of an exploratory stream of consciousness here: #950. I will be updating the ticket with a summary today.

Thanks for checking @mvrhov

I'm not having success with using *string instead of NullString:

overrides:
  - db_type: 'pg_catalog.text'
    go_type:
      type: 'string'
      pointer: true
    nullable: true
  - db_type: 'pg_catalog.text'
    go_type:
      type: 'string'
      pointer: false
    nullable: false

db_type: 'pg_catalog.text' should be db_type: 'text'. Yeah I know it's a mess and mix of both depending on the type.

Tracking documentation improvements for this #2762

This issue appears to be resolved in current versions, but since it remains open and is still discoverable through search engines. I wanted to summarize and document this workaround for anyone facing similar issues and suggest to close the issue if it is no longer relevant and this feature is already documented in the sqlc documentation.

Issue

When using emit_pointers_for_null_types: true with type overrides in sqlc, nullable columns don't generate pointer types as expected for cerain types. For example: pgtype.Timestamptz is generated for nullable timestamptz fields.

Solution

Adding an additional override entry with db_type.nullable: true and go_type.pointer: true resolved the issue:

...
emit_pointers_for_null_types: true
overrides:
  - db_type: "timestamptz"
    go_type:
      import: "time"
      type: "Time"
  - db_type: "timestamptz"
    nullable: true
    go_type:
      import: "time"
      type: "Time"
      pointer: true

Example

Given this SQL schema:

CREATE TABLE "user" (
    ...
    created_at TIMESTAMPTZ NOT NULL DEFAULT NOW(),
    deleted_at TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT NULL
);

The generated Go struct now correctly uses pointer types for nullable fields:

type User struct {
    ...
    CreatedAt time.Time   `json:"created_at"`
    DeletedAt *time.Time  `json:"deleted_at"`
}

Without the nullable override, DeletedAt would be generated as pgtype.Timestamptz instead of *time.Time.

type User struct {
    ...
    CreatedAt time.Time           `json:"created_at"`
    DeletedAt pgtype.Timestamptz  `json:"deleted_at"` 
}

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null pointer overrides not working #814

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mvrhov commented on Feb 9, 2021

jskelcy commented on Mar 19, 2021

mvrhov commented on Mar 22, 2021

jskelcy commented on Mar 22, 2021

ptman commented on Mar 7, 2022

mvrhov commented on Mar 8, 2022

kyleconroy commented on Sep 22, 2023

lightSoulDev commented on Jul 6, 2025

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