Suggestion for service query option $first

[joezappie]

I'm finding in my application often times I want to get one result by something other than its ID. As far as I know, the only way to do this is to do a find(), pass in a $limit: 1 and then grab the first result from the result.

That's really not a big deal, but I feel like this is a very common thing and having a $first parameter would be a nice quality of life feature; especially if you have some routes with pagination and others without as you then need to remember if its results[0] or results.data[0].

All this would do is define the $limit:1 for you and force the returned object to be the first index. Essentially this would add a built in way of doing a get() thats not tied to the id, great for columns with unique indexes or if you only care about the last entry made based on a timestamp, etc.

const order = app.service('api/order').find({
    query: {
         salesNumber: RAV02-00213,
         $first: true,
    }
});

// returns 
{
    _id: 61b46618344a152c6d9654dc,
    salesNumber: RAV02-00213,
    ....
}

Compared to:

const result = await app.service('api/order').find({
    query: {
         salesNumber: RAV02-00213,
         $limit: 1,
    }
});

const order = result.data[0];

I have added a hook for this to my own app incase this doensn't go anywhere but someone else thinks this would be useful.

// getFirstResult.js
export default {
  before: (options = {}) => async (context) => {
    if (context.params?.query?.$first) {
      context.params.query.$limit = 1;
      delete context.params.query.$first;
      context.params.paginate = false;
      context.params.$first = true;
    }
  },
  after: (options = {}) => async (context) => {
    if (context.params?.$first) {
      context.result = context.result[0]; // eslint-disable-line prefer-destructuring
    }
  },
};

// app.hooks.js
module.exports = {
  before: {
    all: [getFirstResult.before()],
  },

  after: {
    all: [getFirstResult.after()],
  },
};

[joezappie]

Alternatively, I do see mongo already has a $first property for its API which could be confusing so this could be $front, $shift, $zero or something similar.