Learning GROQ and querying in Sanity.io can be confusing, but there are helpful resources available.

How would I be able to query that? I'm just learning this and its sort of confusing me

Hi Douglas! I agree that getting started with GROQ can be confusing. Please reach out if you’re interested in some resources—Henrique’s Learn GROQ in 45 Minutes and the Kap & Lauren Learn GROQ video series are two that initially come to mind.
For your query, here’s how I would build it (only the final query is relevant—the rest are just steps to get there—but you should be able to test the intermediary queries in Vision to see what’s returned and infer how you could take the query from there):

• Since queries work left-to-right, you’ll start by getting the documents you want by querying for everything (

*

) that has a

_type

of

post

.
• This query will return all the properties that exist on each post, including your array,

categories

. However, each of those

categories

will be an array of

_type

and

_ref

properties. Since you want to see the contents of those

categories

references, you’ll want to access the reference (i.e., “dereference”) using

->

(see these docs for a bit more explanation), and since

categories

is an array, you’ll want to traverse that array (i.e., loop over each array item) using

[]

. There are two ways this can be done—with a projection or with a naked projection —but we’ll only look at the former:
• Hopefully you’re now seeing an array of

post

documents with the dereferenced

categories

data for each. You likely still want the rest of the

post

properties, which we can ask for in the query using the ellipsis operator (

…

). We put that at the same “level” as the properties we want to return (i.e., as a sibling of

categories

):
I hope this helps explain queries a bit. If anything isn’t working or is still confusing, please follow up. Otherwise, have fun building with GROQ and Sanity.

Thank you so much for the comprehensive response.What a phenomenal help!

Thank you so much for the comprehensive response.What a phenomenal help!