porsager / porsager/postgres

Incorrect type definitions causing confusion when trying to catch PostgresError

Open
#862 2 comments 6 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Typescript
Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
8.7k
Forks
374
Avg merge
11d 16h
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

I noticed that when I want to catch an error and identify it using instanceof I got an error TypeError: Right-hand side of 'instanceof' is not an object. Which was caused by following code:

import { PostgresError } from 'postgres';

try {
  // await query
} catch (e) {
  if (e instanceof PostgresError) {
    // do something
  }
}

To fix that I had to use default import:

import Postgres from 'postgres';

try {
  // await query
} catch (e) {
  if (e instanceof Postgres.PostgresError) {
    // do something
  }
}

This is confusing because typescript was not able to catch the failing example as something wrong and I was able to find this error only in runtime.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the two import forms shown in the issue and inspect how the package exposes PostgresError to TypeScript. The type definitions should accurately represent the runtime export so the named-import example cannot lead to the reported instanceof failure; verify the corrected behavior with the same catch block.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
nodejs, postgres, typescript
Domain
backend, databases
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.