Example uses:
Product documents to an Order documentOrder to feature a placedBy relationship to either an Organization or User collectionCategory documents to Post documents| Option | Description |
|---|---|
name * | To be used as the property name when stored and retrieved from the database. More |
relationTo * | Provide one or many collection slugs to be able to assign relationships to. |
filterOptions | A query to filter which options appear in the UI and validate against. More. |
hasMany | Boolean when, if set to true, allows this field to have many relations instead of only one. |
maxDepth | Sets a number limit on iterations of related documents to populate when queried. Depth |
label | Text used as a field label in the Admin panel or an object with keys for each language. |
unique | Enforce that each entry in the Collection has a unique value for this field. |
validate | Provide a custom validation function that will be executed on both the Admin panel and the backend. More |
index | Build a MongoDB index for this field to produce faster queries. Set this field to true if your users will perform queries on this field's data often. |
saveToJWT | If this field is top-level and nested in a config supporting Authentication, include its data in the user JWT. |
hooks | Provide field-based hooks to control logic for this field. More |
access | Provide field-based access control to denote what users can see and do with this field's data. More |
hidden | Restrict this field's visibility from all APIs entirely. Will still be saved to the database, but will not appear in any API or the Admin panel. |
defaultValue | Provide data to be used for this field's default value. More |
localized | Enable localization for this field. Requires localization to be enabled in the Base config. |
required | Require this field to have a value. |
admin | Admin-specific configuration. See the default field admin config for more details. |
* An asterisk denotes that a property is required.
In addition to the default field admin config, the Relationship field type also allows for the following admin-specific properties:
isSortable
Set to true if you'd like this field to be sortable within the Admin UI using drag and drop. (Only works when hasMany is set to true)
Options can be dynamically limited by supplying a query constraint, which will be used both for validating input and filtering available relationships in the UI.
The filterOptions property can either be a Where query directly, or a function that returns one. When using a function, it will be called with an argument object with the following properties:
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
relationTo | The relationTo to filter against (as defined on the field) |
data | An object of the full collection or global document currently being edited |
siblingData | An object of the document data limited to fields within the same parent to the field |
id | The value of the collection id, will be undefined on create request |
user | The currently authenticated user object |
Example:
You can learn more about writing queries here.
Given the variety of options possible within the relationship field type, the shape of the data needed for creating and updating these fields can vary. The following sections will describe the variety of data shapes that can arise from this field.
The most simple pattern of a relationship is to use hasMany: false with a relationTo that allows for only one type of collection.
The shape of the data to save for a document with the field configured this way would be:
When querying documents in this collection via REST API, you could query as follows:
?where[owner][equals]=6031ac9e1289176380734024.
Also known as dynamic references, in this configuration, the relationTo field is an array of Collection slugs that tells Payload which Collections are valid to reference.
The shape of the data to save for a document with more than one relationship type would be:
Here is an example for how to query documents by this data (note the difference in referencing the owner.value):
?where[owner.value][equals]=6031ac9e1289176380734024.
You can also query for documents where a field has a relationship to a specific Collection:
?where[owners.relationTo][equals]=organizations.
This query would return only documents that have an owner relationship to organizations.
The hasMany tells Payload that there may be more than one collection saved to the field.
To save the to hasMany relationship field we need to send an array of IDs:
When querying documents, the format does not change for arrays:
?where[owners][equals]=6031ac9e1289176380734024.
Relationship fields with hasMany set to more than one kind of collections save their data as an array of objects—each containing the Collection slug as the relationTo value, and the related document id for the value:
Querying is done in the same way as the earlier Polymorphic example:
?where[owners.value][equals]=6031ac9e1289176380734024.