Why select and selectAll wants non-empty seq?

[inv2004]

Hello, was trying to use norm for the first time, was reading documentation and it was very unclear for me:

Why the select requires one element in seq? I suppose model (table and etc) goes from type, why the element is needed here?

var customersFoo = @[newCustomer()]
dbConn.select(customersFoo, "User.email = ?", "[email protected]")

echo()

[moigagoo]

This is because in general, there is no universal way to instantiate a type in Nim. That means, you have just the type, you can't in general create its instance.

Therefore Norm requires an container instance to put the data into. At least one instance is required, it can be copied to fit multiple rows.

[moigagoo]

We've discussed this topic outside of GitHub. It seems that with the introduction of default field values for objects, we can finally reliably use types instead of instances. Also, DateTime type now has a default value.

This means new flavors of the existing procs can already be added, the flavors that take type instead of instance and create a necessary instance on the fly and then call the regular flavor.