Possible bug: querying products tagged with 'trainers' returns products tagged with 'not-trainers'

GraphQL Admin API Troubleshooting
1

I have the following query:

query GetProductsTagged {
          products(query: "status:ACTIVE,tag:Trainers", first: 200) {
        
                nodes {
                
                  id
                  title
                  herring_shoe_id: metafield(namespace: "custom", key: "herring_shoe_id") {
                  
                      value
                      
                  }
                 
            }
            
            pageInfo {
              startCursor
              endCursor
            }
            
          }
          
        }

I have 1351 products tagged with the tag ā€˜not-trainersā€™, which is a utility tag we use to help craft collections of products that we donā€™t want to see trainers in. This is necessary because of Shopifyā€™s limited smart collection functionality: we canā€™t specify a NOT condition for tags in the rules, so this is the workaround we came up with.

I have zero products tagged with the tag ā€˜Trainersā€™.

The above query, which I will remind us all has the query ā€œstatus:ACTIVE,tag:Trainersā€ returnsā€¦

Yes, you guessed it, it returns the 1351 products with the ā€˜not-trainersā€™ tag.

So then I thought, OK, Shopify must do this search based on the tag term being like a tag, so I repeated the query with the term ā€˜rainerā€™:

products(query: ā€œstatus:ACTIVE,tag:rainerā€, first: 200) {

ā€¦and got zero results.

When I wrap the tag term in quotes, like some other examples in the documentation for the products query, like this: products(query: ā€œstatus:ACTIVE,tag:ā€˜Trainersā€™ā€, first: 200) {

The results are the same. 1351 for ā€˜Trainersā€™, again returning the ā€˜not-trainersā€™ products, and zero for ā€˜rainerā€™.

If anyone can shed some light on what is going on here, that would be amazing.

In the meantime I now have to rewrite this code to just get all products, get each productā€™s tags, and then check to see if the tag Iā€™m interested in is one of them. This is bonkers.

Many thanks,

G

PS - wait, did I just do a (minor) inadvertant injection attack?

Edit: noticed the same problem with the productsCount query:

query {
  productsCount(query: "status:ACTIVE,tag:Trainers",limit: null) {
    count
  }
}

returns a count of 1351.

1 Like
2

Hey @dartacus! I initially thought this might be a query syntax issue - youā€™re using "status:ACTIVE,tag:Trainers" when the search syntax grammar requires terms to be separated by spaces or explicit connectives like AND/OR (not commas).

However, when I tested with the documented syntax ("status:ACTIVE tag:Trainers"), the issue still occurs. I tested on my dev store with only not-trainers products (no Trainers products at all), and searching for tag:Trainers still returned the not-trainers products. This happens whether you use quotes for phrase matching or not.

I came across a workaround though; switching from hyphens to underscores. When I tested tag:Trainers, it matched exactly and didnā€™t return any products with the not-trainers tag. So youā€™d need to update your products to use not_trainers instead of not-trainers, which I know is far from ideal.

Iā€™m going to raise this with our API platform team to understand if this tag matching behavior is expected. Do you have any x-request-ids from your API calls I can include when I reach out to them? That would help them investigate your specific requests in case my replication isnā€™t exactly right

3

I donā€™t but I can run them again and get them, I have unit tests set up for this.

4

OK, with quotes: ef7b7798-be69-415f-a583-16d07453292b-1763569077

Without quotes: b5539b47-32c4-4ce8-a26b-5d941fe8ceeb-1763569230

Hope that helps,

G

5

Ideal, Iā€™ll have the products team take a look at this (they own product-related api queries) and get back to you once I have more info to share. Thanks for sharing those!

6

Thanks for the hint on not separating queries with commas, too, donā€™t know where I picked that up, likely trial and error. Will use AND from now on.

G

1 Like
7

Hey @dartacus !

I heard back from our products team about this. Turns out this is expected behavior, though I agree itā€™s not intuitive.

Tags with hyphens get tokenized during search - so not-trainers is split into two tokens: not and trainers. When you search for tag:Trainers, it matches any tag containing the word ā€œtrainersā€, which includes your not-trainers tags. This is how the search syntax works for tokenized fields - the : operator finds the term anywhere in the field.

The good news is there are a couple of workarounds:

Option 1 (as I found during testing): Use underscores instead of hyphens in your tags (e.g., not_trainers instead of not-trainers). Underscores donā€™t act as tokenization delimiters, so tag:Trainers wonā€™t match not_trainers.

Option 2 (Suggested by the Products team): Use negative filtering in your query:

query GetProductsTagged {
  products(query: "status:ACTIVE tag_not:not AND tag:trainers", first: 200) {
    nodes {
      id
      title
      tags
    }
  }
}

This tells the API ā€œgive me products tagged with trainers but NOT tagged with notā€.

Iā€™ve raised this with the products team to see if we can either change the behavior or document this limitation more clearly. Theyā€™ve created an issue to track it internally.

Thanks for flagging this, I hadnā€™t come across it before personally!

8

Thanks Donal, appreciate you letting me know that itā€™s been flagged internally. (Iā€™ll do a reworking of all our tags using option 2 so as to be able to use option 1).

Cheers,

G

1 Like