Querying your Documents

Payload provides an extremely granular querying language through all APIs. Each API takes the same syntax and fully supports all options.

For example, say you have a collection as follows:

const Post = {
  slug: 'posts',
  fields: [
    {
      name: 'color',
      type: 'select',
      options: [
        'mint',
        'dark-gray',
        'white',
      ],
    },
    {
      name: 'featured',
      type: 'checkbox',
    }
  ]
}

You may eventually have a lot of documents within this Collection. If you wanted to find only documents with color equal to mint, you could write a query as follows:

const query = {
  color: { // property name to filter on
    equals: 'mint', // operator to use and value to compare against
  },
}

The above example demonstrates a simple query but you can get much more complex.

In addition to defining simple queries, you can join multiple queries together using simple AND / OR logic. Let's take the above Post collection for example and write a more complex query usnig AND / OR:

const query = {
  or: [ // array of OR conditions
    {
      color: {
        equals: 'mint',
      },
    },
    {
      and: [ // nested array of AND conditions
        {
          color: {
            equals: 'white',
          }
        },
        {
          featured: {
            equals: false,
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Written in plain English, if the above query were passed to a find operation, it would translate to finding posts where either the color is mint OR the color is white AND featured is set to false.

All GraphQL find queries support the where argument, which accepts queries exactly as detailed above.

For example:

query {
  Posts(where: { color: { equals: mint } }) {
    docs {
      color
    }
    totalDocs
  }
}

With the REST API, you can use the full power of Payload queries as well but they become a bit more unwieldy the more complex that they get.

Simple queries are fairly straightforward to write. To understand the syntax, you need to understand how Express and similar languages would go about parsing a complex URL search string into a JSON object. For example, the above simple query would be parsed into a string like this:

https://localhost:3000/api/posts?where[color][equals]=mint

This one isn't too bad, but more complex queries get unavoidably more difficult to write as query strings. For this reason, we recommend to use the extremely helpful and ubiquitous qs package to parse your JSON / object-formatted queries into query strings for use with the REST API.

For example, using fetch:

import qs from 'qs';

const query = {
  color: {
    equals: 'mint',
  },
  // This query could be much more complex
  // and QS would handle it beautifully
}

const getPosts = async () => {
  const stringifiedQuery = qs.stringify({
    where: query // ensure that `qs` adds the `where` property, too!
  }, { addQueryPrefix: true });

  const response = await fetch(`http://localhost:3000/api/posts${stringifiedQuery}`);
  // Continue to handle the response below...
}

The Local API's find operation accepts an object exactly how you write it. For example:

const getPosts = async () => {
  const posts = await payload.find({
    collection: 'posts',
    where: {
      color: {
        equals: 'mint',
      },
    },
  });

  return posts;
}

Payload find queries support a sort parameter through all APIs. Pass the name of a top-level field to sort by that field in ascending order. Prefix the name of the field with a minus symbol ("-") to sort in descending order.

REST example: https://localhost:3000/api/posts?sort=-createdAt

GraphQL example:

query {
  Posts(sort: "-createdAt") {
    docs {
      color
    }
  }
}

Local API example:

const getPosts = async () => {
  const posts = await payload.find({
    collection: 'posts',
    sort: '-createdAt',
  });

  return posts;
}