Querying your Documents
Payload provides an extremely granular querying language through all APIs. Each API takes the same syntax and fully supports all options.
Simple queries
For example, say you have a collection as follows:
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:
The above example demonstrates a simple query but you can get much more complex.
Operators
Operator | Description |
---|---|
equals | The value must be exactly equal. |
not_equals | The query will return all documents where the value is not equal. |
greater_than | For numeric or date-based fields. |
greater_than_equal | For numeric or date-based fields. |
less_than | For numeric or date-based fields. |
less_than_equal | For numeric or date-based fields. |
like | Case-insensitive string must be present. If string of words, all words must be present, in any order. |
contains | Must contain the value entered, case-insensitive. |
in | The value must be found within the provided comma-delimited list of values. |
not_in | The value must NOT be within the provided comma-delimited list of values. |
all | The value must contain all values provided in the comma-delimited list. |
exists | Only return documents where the value either exists (true ) or does not exist (false ). |
near | For distance related to a point field comma separated as <longitude>, <latitude>, <maxDistance in meters (nullable)>, <minDistance in meters (nullable)> . |
And / Or Logic
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 using AND / OR:
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.
Nested properties
When working with nested properties, which can happen when using relational fields, it is possible to use the dot notation to access the nested property. For example, when working with a Song
collection that has a artists
field which is related to an Artists
collection using the name: 'artists'
. You can access a property within the collection Artists
like so:
GraphQL Find Queries
All GraphQL find
queries support the where
argument, which accepts queries exactly as detailed above.
For example:
REST Queries
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:
Local API Queries
The Local API's find
operation accepts an object exactly how you write it. For example:
Sort
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. Because sorting is handled by the database, the field you wish to sort on must be stored in the database to work; not a virtual field. It is recommended to enable indexing for the fields where sorting is used.
REST example:
https://localhost:3000/api/posts?sort=-createdAt
GraphQL example:
Local API example: