Get document creator/user from Sanity query

Unfortunately, Sanity doesn't provide built-in system fields for tracking which user created or modified a document. The system fields available on documents are:

• _id - Unique identifier
• _type - Document type
• _rev - Revision tracking
• _createdAt - Timestamp when created
• _updatedAt - Timestamp when last modified

Notice there's no _createdBy or _updatedBy field that you can query.

Workarounds

If you need to track document creators, you have a couple of options:

1. Manual author field in your schema

Add an author/creator field to your document schema that references a user document:

defineField({
  name: 'author',
  type: 'reference',
  to: [{type: 'person'}]
})

You'd need to manually create person documents for each Sanity user and set this field when creating content.

2. Use Initial Value Templates

You can use Initial Value Templates to automatically populate the author field when a document is created, though this still requires manual setup.

3. Use the History API for audit trails

While you can't query it directly in GROQ, the History API does track transaction history including user information. This is useful for audit trails but not for querying documents by creator in your content queries.

There's a community discussion with a script example for creating person documents from Sanity users if you want to automate the initial setup.

The lack of built-in creator tracking is a common limitation in headless CMS systems where the content authoring layer is separated from the content data layer.