Dry run fails when table/view/assertion to be created does not exists

[ashish10alex]

There are two possible errors relating to dry run:

Tables / views

1. If the table created by a .sqlx file is not already materialised on BigQuery the dry run will fail due to dry run trying to setMetadata on an view/table that does not exist yet. Relevant lines of code

dataform/cli/api/commands/run.ts

Line 371 in 54dfa9c

await this.dbadapter.setMetadata(action);

dataform/cli/api/dbadapters/bigquery.ts

Lines 235 to 239 in 54dfa9c

	const metadata = await this.getMetadata(target);
	const schemaWithDescription = addDescriptionToMetadata(
	actionDescriptor.columns,
	metadata.schema.fields
	);

In these lines metadata for the table/view that already does not exist will be undefined and trying to access .schema attribute of undefined results in the error shown below

---

Assertion

Assertion dry run will face if the table it is trying to create does not already exists. Possibly due to trying to run the following query in the current code base which tries to select from a object that does not exist yet

dataform/cli/api/dbadapters/execution_sql.ts

Line 177 in 54dfa9c

tasks.add(Task.assertion(`select sum(1) as row_count from ${this.resolveTarget(target)}`));

---

Minimal example to reproduce

1. Add the following as a new .sqlx file to a dataform project

config {
  type: "table",
  schema: "dataset_name",
  description: "any non empty description",
  tags: ["TEST_DRY_RUN"]
}


SELECT 1 AS A
UNION ALL
SELECT 1 AS B

To recreate this error for view/assertion type, the type can be replaced by either of the two

2. Run

   dataform run --dry-run --tags="TEST_DRY_RUN"

dataform version: 3.0.2 and also tested by running it from source

[St-Hakky]

Hi, I'm dataform user.

I’m also encountering the same issue, so I wanted to check if there have been any updates on this.

[Ekrekr]

Agreed, we shouldn't be attempting to set metadata on a dry run!

Any chance you can submit a patch yourself? https://github.com/dataform-co/dataform/blob/main/contributing.md

[mkamysz]

Hey @Ekrekr, I opened another PR to resolve this issue, seeing that the original fix has been reverted