Filtering and Sorting

Filtering and sorting results can help speed up responses and data collection.

Filtering

Each section inside the docs that supports filtering will have a list of supported filters defined and you can specify as a query parameter while making the request.

Filters should be provided as a part of the endpoint URL in the following format:

?filter[FILTER_NAME]=VALUE

For example, lets say that you want to get all the users that are named John. It can be done by providing the search filter while making the request:

?filter[search]=John

There are two different types of filters, the exact and partial filters.

Exact Filters

Exact filters will only return those records where a specific attribute is exactly the same as the provided filter value.

For example, if an endpoint supports an exact filter for filtering out the records by status and if you provide ?filter[status]=1 query parameter, only records that have the status attribute set to 1 will be returned.

Partial Filters

The partial filters are usually used for text based fields an it will return all the records that have the provided filter vaule anywhere within the attribute value.

For example, if there is a filter name defined for the specific resource and you provide the ?filter[name]=one filter within the URL, the API will return all the customers from the db that contain the word one anywhere within their name attribute and not only those who has the name exactly set as one.

Sorting

All sortable resources will provide the list of sortable fields that can be used for sorting the data that is being returned from the API.

To sort a resource by the specific field, just append the ?sort=FIELD query parameter while you make the request to the API endpoint and it will sort the items in ascending order. To sort the items in descending order, prefix the field with - sign: ?sort=-FIELD.

For example, if you want to sort the users in ascending order by the created_at timestamp, you should make a request to the following endpoint:

/users?sort=created_at

If you want to sort them by the created_at timestamp in descending order, the enpoint should be updated to look like the following:

/users?sort=-created_at