How to make type generation work without custom definitions provided?

[alexxxkny]

• I'm submitting a ...

• [ ] Bug report
• [ ] Feature request
• [x] Support request
• [ ] Other

• What is the current behavior and expected behavior? I am generating types as it described in documentation. And everything works fine when you provide some type definitions through src/interfaces/definitions.ts and src/interfaces/<module>/definitions.ts. But when you not - you get empty types.ts and this occurs a compilation error as empty types.ts is not a module but re-exported in index.ts this way export * from './types'. It works fine if you add export {} to types.ts, but doing this manually every time is not an option. Also you could add fake module without actual definitions like this

  
  // src/interfaces/module/definitions.ts
  export default { types: { } }

// src/interfaces/definitions.ts export {default as module} from './module/definitions'

For now I have no need to provide our chain's definitions so I wonder is there a more clean solution for this case?
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  - Version: 9.14.2
  - Environment:

    - [x] Node.js
    - [ ] Browser
    - [ ] Other (limited support for other environments)

  - Language:

    - [ ] JavaScript
    - [x] TypeScript (Version 4.9.5)
    - [ ] Other

[jacogr]

Not sure there is any solution. (Even in the definitions themeselves, there are sometimes no types, e.g. just RPC/runtime, for those a phantom is add to the contained types.ts, e.g. see https://github.com/polkadot-js/api/blob/master/packages/types/src/interfaces/aura/types.ts#L11)

Happy to accept PRs that cater for empty,

• this is the template file https://github.com/polkadot-js/api/blob/master/packages/typegen/src/templates/tsDef/types.hbs
• this is where it gets populated https://github.com/polkadot-js/api/blob/master/packages/typegen/src/fromDefs.ts

At worst, I suppose the root types.hbs can just get a PHANTOM_GERERATED_<Date.now()> export. Hacky in the same vein as those above and should not create any conflicts. (Not entirely sure how that translated to the handlebars template lange, we potentially need to pass something additional through to the template on generation)