How to handle nulls when scanning by name .RowsToStructByName[Lax]

[sai-sy]

I'm trying to get a row scanned into my struct, and I got most of the way through, but one of my rows is missing some data, and I'm wondering how to handle that since when using

r, err := pgx.CollectRows(rows, pgx.RowToStructByNameLax[person])

I get the error

2024/03/28 02:14:33 can't scan into dest[5]: cannot scan NULL into *time.Time

and the documentation doesn't seem the mention anything (unless I am just reading right over it

Also does PGX support casting into strings on scan. I had to import time to handle created_by which is fine but postgres has some deeper types that might get weird to cast into no? That is on the same note as handling null but not entirely so not sure if it warrants it's own discussion

[sai-sy]

Okay, I see that I can set the field type to an interface and then check case for each one. That seems like a poor pattern, would there be a different way to handle this?

[jackc]

The problem is not specific to pgx.RowToStructByNameLax. The problem is time.Time cannot represent NULL. You would get the same issue if you were calling Scan yourself.

The solution is to use a type that can represent a NULL such as *time.Time, pgtype.Timestamptz, or zeronull.Timestamptz.