Products graphQL metafield querying can be tricky

GraphQL Admin API Troubleshooting
1

Just an advisory that querying on metafield values can provide some very odd results if you trip up on the syntax.

Querying like this got me 1857 results: products(query: “status:ACTIVE,metafields.custom.disabled_on_herring:<1”, first: 200)

Querying like this only got me 431: products(query: “status:ACTIVE,metafields.custom.disabled_on_herring:0”, first: 200)

The actual result is 1563.

That metafield only has two possible values for active products: 0 or 1. Therefore these queries should be functionally equivalent. I was confused.

The separator needs to be AND/OR, not a comma - but (the tricky part) it won’t fail with a syntax error, it will just return weird results. I’d raised this issue and done tests to confirm before I noticed what I’d done.

An error or userError in the response would be useful here.

G

PS: not even the first time I’ve made this mistake: Possible bug: querying products tagged with 'trainers' returns products tagged with 'not-trainers' - #8 by dartacus

1 Like
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Hey @dartacus, thanks for sharing this.

For anyone hitting queries that aren’t being parsed as expected, it’s worth including the Shopify-Search-Query-Debug: 1 request header. It enables the search debug extension on any query, which can surface how the query is being interpreted.

I’ve noted this additional context internally as well.

1 Like
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Will use that next time, many thanks.

G