Querying and expanding references in Sanity.io search queries

I’m in the process of building a search query and would like to guidance on search and expanding references.My query thus far:

This works fine for finding documents where the query matches title or address but the results do not expand the artist or mainImage references. What am I doing wrong?
Also, how should I structure this query so I can also search the artist.name (expanded reference) field with the $q param?
Thank you!

That’s exactly what I get if I change the code to your snippet

That’s really odd then that when you add

->

after each, you’re not getting the dereferenced documents.

Is artist an array of references? That might explain why

"artist": artist

returns refs but

"artist": artist->

does not.

If that’s the case, you’d want

'artist': artist[]->name

.

I apologize I mis spoke in my original post.The refernces are getting expanded, the wall I’m hitting it how I can apply the

match

$q to the reference fields

For example, I have an artist.name “Isamu Noguchi”, but this query:

*[title match $q || address match $q || artist match $q]{

...,

"artist": artist[] -> name,

"mainImage": image.asset->

}

returns nothing on the

$q

“Isamu”.Whereas there is (an unreferenced)

artwork

called “Sunken Garden” and the $q “Sunken” works fine

I suppose I could query all the documents and filter in the frontend but that seems wasteful

If I understand what you’re after, I think there are a few ways this could be approached. If we look at just your filter, are you hoping to get one type of document back? If it’s a type of

artwork

, you might need to change your filter to match from that perspective (e.g.,

... || artist[]->name match $q

).

You could also do a join —something like:

Thanks that did it. Looking over the GROQ cheat sheet again I can see how this answer could be extrapolated from the docs but this seems to me a worthwhile addition to the examples.Thanks again!

Glad to hear it's working for you!