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GROQ: Query reverse relationships - get all businesses by county reference

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Last updated: Nov 29, 2025
Hi, anyone able to help with a relationship thing?
I have several schemas set up, like, Country, County, and Business, each country has counties (county) each county has businesses, so, each business belongs to one county and I want to be able to GROQ all businesses in a county.

I have made a query for all counties in a country where I add a county to a country then I can get the county names from the country *`*[_type == "country"]{...,county[]->}`* but I don't want the user to have to add the business to a county as logically when you're entering the address details for a business in the CMS you'd do it all in on data entry form, I guess... If it's not all in one place then the user will probably forget to add the business to the county then there'll be no record of it when searching for businesses by county.

What I trying to articulate (badly) is that I want to do the reverse for relationships so I can get all businesses in a county by adding the county to the business rather than the business to the county
AI Update

Perfect! You're looking for a "reverse reference" query, and GROQ has exactly what you need with the references() function.

Instead of adding businesses to a county (which would be awkward data entry), you can keep your current approach where you add the county reference to each business document during data entry. Then use references() to query all businesses in a specific county.

Here's how it works:

Your Business schema (what you probably already have):

{
  name: 'business',
  type: 'document',
  fields: [
    {name: 'name', type: 'string'},
    {name: 'address', type: 'string'},
    {
      name: 'county',
      type: 'reference',
      to: [{type: 'county'}]
    }
  ]
}

Query all businesses in a specific county:

*[_type == "business" && references("county-document-id")]

Or if you want to query from the county document itself:

*[_type == "county" && slug.current == "your-county-slug"][0]{
  name,
  "businesses": *[_type == "business" && references(^._id)]{
    name,
    address
  }
}

The ^._id syntax accesses the parent county's ID from within the subquery, so it automatically finds all businesses that reference that specific county.

This is exactly the pattern described in the references() function documentation - it lets you do reverse lookups without having to maintain relationships in both directions. Your users just add the county when creating a business (which makes sense from a data entry perspective), and you can still easily query all businesses by county.

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