Access collection item by slug (or any unique field)?

[revnelson]

Adding a field with unique: true creates an Index on the collection. Is there any way to access collection items by unique indexes other than id? For example, fetching https://example.com/api/pages/home would be much better DX than

const paginatedPages = await fetch("https://example.com/api/pages?where[slug][equals]=home").then(async res => await res.json())

if ((paginatedPages?.docs?.length ?? 0) > 0) {
   const page = paginatedPages.docs.at(0)
}

[ChrisGV04]

Not yet, unfortunately. It would be nice but I think it could have a lot of weird edge-cases or make certain queries a bit slower since you can have multiple unique fields inside the same collection, so it would have to check for all of them.

For example: A User document could have a unique id, slug and email fields at the same time, so calling GET /api/users/my-slug would need to check if an ID, a slug or an email match my-slug. It might be inefficient, but I'm not sure.

However, you always can create your own Express route to do exactly that by calling GET /api/page-by-slug/home . Yes, it's more work but that's the beauty of Payload's flexibility to add something if you need it even if it doesn't have it currently.