How can I use jq 'try-catch' inside of an object construction - bash

Question

The general problem statement is that I have some json data with fields that may or may not exist. Patterns like try .foo catch "bar" or .foo? // "bar" work just fine on their own, but not inside of an object construction cat myfile.json | jq -r '{foo: try .foo catch "bar"}'. Using an object construction is important for my use case, where I need to pass the same input through many filters and format the data nicely for later functions.
The data I'm working with is the output of kubectl get pods xxxxx -o json, and the part I'm trying to parse looks like this
{
"items": [
{
"status": {
"conditions": [
{
"type": "Initialized",
"message": "foo"
},
{
"type": "Ready"
}
]
}
},
{
"status": {
}
}
]
}
For each item, if it has .status.conditions, I want the message from the first element in .status.conditions that has a message. The filter I used looks like this
jq -r '.items[] | {message: .status.conditions?|map(select(has("message")).message)[0]?}'
The problem is that when it gets to an item that doesn't have a .status.conditions, It returns the error Cannot iterate over null (null). This makes sense given that .status.conditions? passes null to the next filter, map which needs to iterate over a list. My attempted solution was to use various ways of try-catch to pass an empty list to map instead of null
jq -r '.items[] | {message: .status | try .conditions catch [] |map(select(has("message")).message)[0]?}'
jq -r '.items[] | {message: .status.conditions? // []|map(select(has("message")).message)[0]?}'
or to use a ? that includes the map call
jq -r '.items[] | {message: (.status.conditions?|map(select(has("message")).message)[0])?}'
jq -r '.items[] | {message: .status.conditions?|(map(select(has("message")).message)[0])?}'
All of these attempts return 1 compile error when written inside of an object constructor as shown, and work as expected when written on their own without an object constructor (e.g. '.items[] | .status.conditions?|(map(select(has("message")).message)[0])?')
The jq man page doesn't give any warnings (that I noticed) about how object construction changes the syntax requirements of what's inside, nor how try-catch can be affected by being inside an object construction. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Thanks to #Fravadona, it was just a matter of parentheses. I had tried it at some point and made some mistake or other, but a working solution for my case is
jq -r '{message: .status | (.conditions? // []) | map(select(has("message")).message)[0]?}'