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A bad query that returns something shows a warning tooltip with the error string, e.g.:
  <ask>[[Help: ]][[Help:Annotation]]</ask>

But if a bad query returns nothing, you don't get a warning tooltips of errors from the query}}.  E.g. we add a second page to the above query:
  <ask>[[Help: ]][[Help:Annotation]][[Property:Climate]]</ask>

and see nothing.

The bug is in SMW_QueryPrinter.php's SMWResultPrinter->getResultHTML() method.  There are several code paths that don't append $this->getErrorString($results).  The one I hit is if count is 0 and no further results, then the result printer just returns the default text (usually none); but I think there are others.  The patch below fixes this case but leaves others; maybe it would be better to replace the early returns with fall-through to a single append of the error string before returning.

Index: SMW_QueryPrinter.php
===================================================================
--- .	(revision 27065)
+++ .	(working copy)
@@ -47,7 +47,8 @@
 		$this->readParameters($params);
 		if ($results->getCount() == 0) {
 			if (!$results->hasFurtherResults()) {
-				return htmlspecialchars($this->mDefault);
+				$result = htmlspecialchars($this->mDefault);
+				$result .= $this->getErrorString($results); // just append error messages
 			} elseif ($this->mInline) {
 				$label = $this->mSearchlabel;
 				if ($label === NULL) { //apply defaults