Allow relationship fields to be used within listSearchableFields

[Stupidism]

When a relationship field is used within listSearchableFields, the List view will break because the search term entered will be used as a regex search on the id field of the related document.

To properly support relationship field within listSearchableFields, we need to determine the field type for each specified listSearchableField, and if it's a relationship or upload, format the field's query to search on the useAsTitle field instead of the relationship ID.

Original report below:

Bug Report

I tried to support suport for multiple fields in my article list page

    listSearchableFields: ['title', 'slug', 'description', 'tags'],

I got this error

{"errors":[{"message":"Document can't have $ prefix field names: $regex"}]}

And I inspected the network request found out it's caused by this query:

https://seo-payload.prod.getjerry.com/api/articles?locale=en&depth=0&draft=true&page=1&where[or][0][title][like]=than&where[or][1][slug][like]=than&where[or][2][description][like]=than&where[or][3][tags][like]=than

Steps to Reproduce

1. Find a collection with tags relationship or anything similar. I don't think hasMany is required to reproduce this bug
2. mark that field as listSearchableFields
3. type anything to search in the list view you will see page blank
4. inspect the network request you will see the error.

Other Details

[Stupidism]

Maybe add a check that the relationship type is not allowed in listSearchableFields ?
This is annoying because I cannot reproduct it in dev mode. It only shows no result

[jmikrut]

Yep - I think there are a few things we could do to improve this behavior.

Right now, the query that is made on your tags field is treating your search term as if it were an ID, and trying to use the search term kentucky as if it were a text field, but in reality, it's searching on the tag IDs which will break.

Instead, we could intelligently parse the field type for each listSearchableField, and if it's a relationship, we could format the search term used to search on the related collection field that is set to useAsTitle instead.

I'll mark this as a planned discussion feature request and we will get it added! We would also happily accept a PR here as well!

[DanRibbens]

It should not only use useAsTitle, but also use the listSearchableField from the relationship collection. It just needs to concat the relationship field name in front of the relationship field search keys.

[JessChowdhury]

We should also allow group fields to be used in listSearchableFields - related discussion here.

[DanRibbens]

A quick update on how to do this now even though the code here hasn't changed in a time.

It isn't documented but you can use subfield paths in your listSearchableFields to support many combinations beyond simply pointing to a top level field on the collection.

For example if you have a relationship field with name: 'categories' you might want to add listSearchableFields: ['title', 'categories.name'] so that the name of your categories is can be used to give back the search results.

The same idea works for groups, arrays, etc. One limitation you might run into is with polymorphic relationships, since Payload doesn't currently support querying on values of a relationship across collections.

This should be better documented and in addition to this. I still think there is some more work to do. If a config specifies a relationship as the listSearchableFields we could automatically add the search fields of the related collection.

Say we have Posts and Categories and on posts the listSearchableFields has category, a relationship field. On categories we have listSearchableFields: ['name']. Then the sanitized result of posts listSearchableFields would end up with ['title', 'category.name']. This way any change to the categories search fields would carry through to other collections.