What causes "The request returned empty." in OpenBB-finance/OpenBB?

Retry with a major economy first (country='us') to confirm the endpoint itself works.

OpenBB-finance/OpenBB · error · EmptyDataError

The request returned empty.

Error message

The request returned empty.

What it means

Raised as EmptyDataError by EconDbGdpNominalFetcher.aextract_data after all per-country requests completed but none produced a non-empty final DataFrame, so the results list is still empty. It means the API was reachable yet returned no usable rows for any requested country.

Source

Thrown at openbb_platform/providers/econdb/openbb_econdb/models/gdp_nominal.py:182

            final_df = concat(
                [gdp, gdp_qoq, gdp_yoy],
                axis=1,
            )
            if final_df.empty:
                warn(f"Error: No data returned for {_country}.")
            if not final_df.empty:
                results.extend(
                    final_df.reset_index()
                    .rename(columns={"Country": "country"})
                    .to_dict(orient="records")
                )

        chunks = [country[i : i + 6] for i in range(0, len(country), 6)]
        for chunk in chunks:
            await asyncio.gather(*[get_one_country(c) for c in chunk])

        if not results:
            raise EmptyDataError("The request returned empty.")

        return results

    @staticmethod
    def transform_data(
        query: EconDbGdpNominalQueryParams,
        data: list[dict],
        **kwargs,
    ) -> list[EconDbGdpNominalData]:
        """Transform the data."""
        # pylint: disable=import-outside-toplevel
        from pandas import DataFrame, to_datetime

        df = DataFrame(data)

        if query.start_date:
            df = df[to_datetime(df["date"]) >= to_datetime(query.start_date)]
        if query.end_date:

View on GitHub (pinned to 3e071fcc2c)

Solutions

Retry with a major economy first (country='us') to confirm the endpoint itself works.
Reduce the request to fewer countries to isolate which one returns nothing.
Try again later — a total-empty result across all countries often indicates an upstream EconDB issue.
If persistent, inspect the raw API response for your tickers and report an issue to the openbb-econdb provider.

Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Try / catch

from openbb_core.provider.utils.errors import EmptyDataError
try:
    res = obb.economy.gdp_nominal(provider='econdb', country='us')
except EmptyDataError:
    logger.warning('EconDB returned no GDP data; retrying with fallback provider')
    res = obb.economy.gdp_nominal(provider='oecd', country='united_states')

Prevention

Probe with one major economy before batch queries.
Have a second provider (oecd/fred) configured as fallback.
Wrap provider calls so EmptyDataError maps to an explicit no-data path, not a crash.

When it happens

Trigger: economy.gdp_nominal(provider='econdb', country=...) where every country's series response is empty or fails to parse into final_df — e.g. deprecated tickers, temporary upstream data gaps, or all countries erroring silently in get_one_country.

Common situations: Querying countries EconDB has no quarterly nominal GDP series for; upstream schema change breaking the per-country parse; mass-querying many countries where all happen to fail.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of OpenBB-finance/OpenBB@3e071fcc2c (2026-08-14). Data as JSON: /api/errors/7be3df52696bf1d0. Report an issue: GitHub.