---
title: Developer office hours: Search API beta
slug: developer-office-hours-search-api-beta
published_at: 2021-09-24 17:29:51 +0000
updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:53:10 +0000
summary: 
description: If you are interested in participating in the Search API beta, please reach out: search-api@stripe.com with your email address and account ID.   01:00 Developer updates 07:10 Search API demo  Join Charles and CJ to get a sneak peek of the brand new Search API beta and get your questions answered live. #Stripe #Payments
tags: [developer office hours, search api, stripe beta, stripe search beta, stripe search, search api beta, @charlesw_dev, @cjav_dev]
views: 1034
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/developer-office-hours-search-api-beta
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMpXRTFpsgY
youtube_id: rMpXRTFpsgY
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/rMpXRTFpsgY
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rMpXRTFpsgY/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Developer office hours: Search API beta

*Published: September 24, 2021*
*Views: 1034*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMpXRTFpsgY)

[![Developer office hours: Search API beta](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rMpXRTFpsgY/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMpXRTFpsgY)

## Description

If you are interested in participating in the Search API beta, please reach out: search-api@stripe.com with your email address and account ID. 

01:00 Developer updates
07:10 Search API demo

Join Charles and CJ to get a sneak peek of the brand new Search API beta and get your questions answered live.
#Stripe #Payments

## Transcript

[Music] welcome back to stripe developer office hours i'm cj villa developer advocate here at stripe and i'm joined by charles watkins another developer advocate here at stripe charles you mind giving a quick intro for us yeah of course welcome uh i'm charles a developer advocate at strike we're so happy to have you back here at developer office hours it's been a minute hasn't it cj it has it has we haven't done an actual live developer office hours in quite a little while so yeah excited excited to be live again thanks again so much for joining us um we've got yeah we've got a pretty exciting episode this uh this time around we're going to show you a sneak peek for a brand new pattern we're adding to the stripe api that um yeah we're pretty pumped about it and it should really increase your performance and make make your applications a little bit more efficient by not having to pull so we're going to dig into that in a little bit but we want to just kind of like get started and welcome everyone and maybe share a couple other updates we've got going on so awesome i am so here uh this this past week has been pretty busy uh as you may have seen we launched stripe tax which uh enables you to um facilitate you know accepting accepting tax automatically with checkout we've actually got an episode all about how to do that so matt our very own matt ling did an episode here with kelly moriarty it's available on the youtube channel if you want to head over and take a look at stripe tax that is up and running and you can learn all about how to handle taxes with stripe we also recently updated our checkout integration so now we have a server side option so after you've created a checkout session on the server there is now a url embedded on the checkout session so that's returned now as part of the checkout session object that you get back when you create a brand new checkout session we also added support for recovering abandoned carts in checkout so a lot of a lot of brand new features coming to check out a lot of really exciting stuff happening around checkout i'm i'm excited about this one there's there's a lot of different tools too that we're adding there was another one that was also released this week for doing upsells so if you are selling a recurring price you can offer a maybe you have like a checkout session that has a monthly price that might be ten dollars a month you can also upsell that to 100 a month directly in checkout and there's a there's a little toggle there for you so lots of really awesome features coming for stripe checkout or that are now available for stripe checkout so head over take a look at those we also released support for pre-authorized debit payments in canada one other thing to mention too the the length for subscription ids went from 18 to 28 characters so if you've got uh if you've got some database constraints around the length of your subscription ids you might want to go update that finally here i wanted to also share that we have this brand new sort of type of demo that we're launching um matt ling and paul from uh from the stripe developer advocacy team have been working on a bunch of tiny demos they're called tiny demos these are bite-sized end-to-end demos that show you how to build parts of parts of a stripe integration so here we're talking about how you implement afterpay clearpay which allows your customers to pay in sort of installments so you can click on pay here and check out the demo directly on glitch so glitch has been a great partner here and we're walking through the test flow here but what's really cool about these is you can actually read the code behind for these tiny demos um and inside of glitch you can actually just update the code right here and remix the demo so you can update it and play around with the different parameters that are accepted and run your own version of the tiny demo so pretty exciting stuff um charles was there any uh this this week there was a bunch of new things released for checkout anything particularly exciting to you i think what's like okay so you kind of touched on it already but with the recover abandoned carts one of the things that's super cool for that is that it also has like enables you to do something like analytics to see how often you succeeded with recovering those abandoned carts so that's part of the flow too so that's incredibly exciting and then in addition to just like the canadian pre-authorized debits it's a great payment method but i just want to throw throw it out there that if you are like a business that accepts uh donations oftentimes in canada like pre-authorized debits are the way to go especially if they're like larger donations so um if you're in that space is especially exciting amazing amazing yeah that's great for for those non-profits in canada that want to accept uh accept donations that's cool i i don't think that i had i had dug into the the conversion tracking for this cart abandonment this looks really powerful um yeah this is this is super exciting um there's there's just so many awesome things coming to check out it's hard to keep up so i uh yeah i if you're not already subscribed there is a check out newsletter that you can you can subscribe to for updates that are all about the striped checkout product um very cool there is it looks like we already got a question are there any interview oh that's a nice feature yeah any integration demo for stripe with angular good question good question so we've got a um we have a a community expert ricardo who is working on uh ngx stripe but i don't think we have any official demos for how to use stripe with angular i think it would be awesome for us to make one of those what do you think charles like um yeah i haven't touched angular in a little while either but i do expect that uh we'll probably do maybe a getting started with ngx stripe here pretty soon uh let's pull this up yeah so rich knowledgies this is the uh the repo that you want to check out ngx stripe here for uh adding support for an angular 6 plus application it has support for all of the stripe elements and all the client-side pieces that you would need so definitely recommend checking that out i can actually drop that in the chat here cool all right let's take a look at um yeah let's take a look at the search api so we're gonna uh at the at the high level we've heard a lot of users asking for the ability to retrieve stripe objects based on different properties of the object and if you are familiar with the list endpoints for stripe we have inside of the api reference we have list endpoints for most of the objects that you can retrieve from the stripe api for instance customers here we have a list endpoint and most of the time list endpoints are only going to have parameters for paginating through the list in the case of customers we do also have this email option where you can filter by a customer's email but most of the time it's really just these sort of list parameters and so many many customers or users that we were talking to were reaching out and asking for a way to search for a specific object maybe by metadata or by other properties of of an object and so what we would love is your feedback about a brand new query language that we're building into the search api and the client libraries and so what i wanted to do is just kind of like give you a quick overview of the brand new stripe api or this brand new search api that's part of stripe and we'll take a look so as part of the beta so we're going to be running a beta program here where you can actually install a beta version of either the stripe node sdk the stripe node client library or the stripe java client libraries and we have examples for how to install those that will be here in the docs once you're added to the beta so you'll notice that it's a little bit different when you're initializing stripe you'll pass in we're gonna we're gonna use the stripe search beta npm module and for java uh we'll we'll also pull in um the the dependency when we're when we're specifying it in palm.xml or however you're gonna install the package as java search beta stripe java search beta and the way that this the search beta works is as part of the header you're going to pass search api beta v1 this is once you're sort of added to the beta you'll have access to this on your account and if you're using the stripe api client libraries this will be done for you by default so you don't actually have to use that now if we take a look at some of these examples you can see that we can use a brand new method on the top level resource called search so you may have been familiar with calling the list endpoint now we're going to have a brand new endpoint called search so i think maybe it makes sense to actually go through a demo um so yeah let's jump into that um so yeah so this is with the beta we're using this beta npm module with node and i have added a little bit of instrumentation here so we can see every time a request is fired as we're working with the api and i wrote a little method here to find customers and when we're when we're looking for these customers we're going to maybe let's go through the case where we want to search for a customer by metadata if we open up a customer in the stripe dashboard here and i happen to have one called find me in test mode let's see find me all right so i've got i've got this customer find me at example.com and right now if we wanted to i think pretty easily we could use sort of the list endpoint so like for async const customer stripe.customers oh this is actually 408 uh dot list email you can find them by their email address just fine and by using this for await syntax we're going to auto paginate through all the results that we get back from the list endpoint and maybe we'll just push on any customers that we find and we'll just run this with node find customers dot js and so it pretty quickly finds the one customer that we're looking for because this customer's endpoint does support filtering by email so we've got we've got the one customer that we wanted back but now let's let's uh let's consider the case where we don't actually know the email of the customer but we might have some like internal id maybe a user id inside of our database for the customer we want to like pull and find the striped customer that's related to them and maybe for some reason we didn't actually store the stripe customer id so this cuss understore cus underscore if we haven't if we didn't store that in our database then the only other way that we might be able to find them is if for instance we had some user id that was the user id in our own database so maybe this person's user id is seven eight nine um all right this is where it gets hairy too right like if if you need to go through a list of any of the stripe objects uh traditionally with that search api you're just you're just making api calls until you find it exactly yeah so in this case there's no list there's no list uh parameters that we can pass defined by metadata right so if we we use the limit parameter to make sure that we get pages of a hundred customers at a time and then we can say if customer.metadata is equal to like 789 because it will come back as a string then we add it to the list now if we try to find that same customer right because we don't know their email address now we're paging through every single page of results right and so in this case this is super inefficient but i i suspect a lot of folks are trying to do things like this where they're trying to target and look up objects based on their metadata um yeah so i've got i think i have like 3 000 customers in my account here this demo account we can look in here for a while yeah there's a lot of a lot of demo customers um so i guess that's gonna this is gonna end up firing off 32 api calls to stripe uh before actually returning and so that was probably like 30 seconds or something maybe 30 seconds or longer just to find this one object and i sort of expect that most of y'all have businesses that are way more successful than my demo my demo account with a lot of jenny rosens but we were able to again successfully find the customer but it did take a long time so um let's refactor and make this a little quicker so i'm going to just copy and paste so this is like the old inefficient way and then we'll comment this on uh okay so the new the new the brand new search api instead of using list we're going to change this out and swap it to search and you can technically still use a limit parameter because it is possible that your search results are paginated and you might have pages and you want those pages to have 100 items in them but in this case i'll just remove it for simplicity and here's where we're going to specify the actual query that we want to fire off to look for a customer object and if we head back over to the docs for a second and take a look at the query language so we see some of these examples here this is actually how we do the search by metadata so you can specify metadata with the flat brackets and your your key and your value in double quotes um this will allow you to um sort of specify strings and the c we're using a colon here in between instead of an equal sign and so this is kind of what the structure of the query would look like for metadata so if here we say metadata i guess we're looking for 789 right and the key is going to be user id so you can kind of see down here we have metadata.user id and so that's going to be our metadata.userid and the value being 789 the value being 789. so we can actually remove the the if statement here and now if we run this again we will see we have we fire off just one query so we're only firing one query and if we take a closer look at this specific um path for this you'll notice that we actually have v1 slash search customers so this is where um the the like the structure of the brand new endpoints uh as part of the apis is uh v1 search customers and so when we look for payments it'll be like v1 search payment intents or v1 search charges and again the query is a single query string parameter that's name is query and then the value is the structured query language that we're working on and so yeah we were able to sort of immediately find that one customer based on their metadata and it was very quick right just one just one request yeah that's pretty interesting like um it's interesting as like search is like its own api because you would think you might you might just assume that they would just nest a new option underneath um all the different apis and api objects but it's its own it's its own thing that's pretty sweet and this is just like what it is in a dashboard like there's so often you'll be on a dashboard it's like i need to find something and you can just write a dashboard query to get it really quickly and now you essentially have the same power with the search api which is it's pretty sweet right yeah so this is a this is a really common one that i have used in the dashboard before which is like last four right um obviously if we do four two four two in the test account that's probably gonna be everything but uh yeah so maybe we can try and actually do the same the same type of query for some payments um maybe in another script that sound sound good yeah for sure that sounds great because like being able to do those types of searches with just like a simple api is incredible because i know not everybody um that needs to be able to look at stripe data for business necessarily has access to the dashboard so now you have you can make a pretty much a read-only resource um so they can get to the data that they need without necessarily provisioning them access you know it's pretty cool yeah i love that i love that yeah absolutely um yeah so you could you could imagine building your own dashboards right you could build your own sort of interface that allows you to search through all the same stuff yeah um all right so we've got payment intents here uh and so actually i think in the so yeah in the search api details we can take a look at all the different supported uh fields that you can search by so we've got several that are supported on charges and then there's also many that are supported on payment intent subscriptions invoices customer so the biggest the biggest collection here is actually uh the biggest like supported resource that has many many different fields is actually charges so here if i if i search through stripe dot charges and we're querying for we're looking for the last four so we want to go through the paymentmethoddetails.card.last4 and if we say let's actually say 3155 that's the sca card and yeah so we'll see we'll log out i guess charge so this is going to be all charges and we'll log out the amount currency and status and the charge id i think let's let's give this a try find payments so this one is yeah so this is logging out several different pages of payments and we can see that it's usd succeeded we see the charge id there so this is pretty cool because you can now exactly you can make your own dashboard where maybe if a customer writes in to the support team and they say hey i um you know i would i need to refund a certain payment or i'm trying to look up a certain order here's the last four of my card now you can build an interface for the support team to pull all the different charges that are based on that that last four for the card number without needing to actually give access full access to the stripe dashboard to those folks um if you don't uh need to the other thing that's really cool is you can actually combine these queries so if we have let's let's show maybe all of the charges that have this three one five five card but also have maybe currency uh is uh euros and um that so you can you can use um all of these different combinations nice so here we have i apparently only have four four charges that have been used with that card that are with euros now we can we can actually filter even further and say we only want the where the amount is over a certain uh uh value so we can actually say like and maybe amount is greater than euro and now if we run this again we can see this charge that was five euro was excluded from the list so very powerful stuff but obviously we're very much still in beta and would love your feedback about the query language so if you're curious about this if you're interested in checking out the beta please let us know um yeah so if we dig into some more of the different supported search fields you can see that it actually gets a little bit more interesting too because you can use sort of fuzzy fuzzy searching based on a strings you can also use specific integer values for when the the underlying field is an integer you can specify card brands um so there's yeah there's quite a bit of flexibility here but absolutely wanna hear your feedback so cool oh we got some feedback already all right cool um thanks so much really appreciate yeah i really appreciate your time and attention and um yeah charles is this yeah i'm excited to build to build some dashboards with this uh and i know that there's there's quite a few things that you know folks may there's a lot of different applications and use cases that you can think of doing with this one that comes to mind for me is building sort of a magic link service almost where you can sort of just store all of your user the the user's data is actually in stripe and then you can look them up by some user id send them an email right or almost almost building like using this as your back end where you have maybe the the small amount of data that you need on a customer is actually stored in the metadata for a customer and then you use yeah uh magic link authentication or something but that would be amazing i mean you know before i was a da i did integration engineering so i like totally i'm like super excited about this because i remember running into scenarios not often where it was like oh it'd be really nice if i had this like dash i could search through my objects with the api as quickly as i can with the dashboard or like if i could build my own dashboard because like a lot of times you know sometimes people just use the stripe objects as like a kind of like a database like they'll just like load up on those metadata keys because i think you get like 50 of them right so yeah that's right it's it's nice that you don't have to page through things anymore you can just you can do it proper right yeah um so that's that's super exciting i'm really i'm really looking forward to playing around with search api and like trying to trying to build something i don't know if anyone on the stream uh right now has like had to go through the use case of like listing through through objects but if you if you have i'd be interested to know like what you what you did with it yeah exactly yeah let us know in the comments um what yeah what you're what you're interested in using this this uh search pattern for or what you're already using maybe batch list calls for that you might be able to replace with uh with the search api another another use case that we've sort of talked about is you know if you if you wanted to um poll for certain specific changes now you can do that on a very targeted level so instead of pulling maybe all of your payments just to see if you have one payment where they bought a blue t-shirt you might be able to now use the search api to pull a more targeted or specific specific narrow use case that you can build automations based on so you wouldn't necessarily receive a web hook that is like narrowly defined as this but you could potentially up update your polling or any polling that you're already doing to use search and really cut down the amount of api calls that you need yeah that would be super cool so like if we if okay example i'm just making stuff up so i don't know if this is something that people would do but like imagine you got the scenario where you're like you accept sepa debit right and seven debit can take a minute so you know when the person like processes their payment they put in their details you don't necessarily fulfill the order so you send them an email them immediately right and maybe you just want to like follow up with the with the end customer so that they want so that they know that you're still working on it and you're just like waiting for their money you could potentially use the search api to search for payments based on like payment method payment status and then like send them a nice email after three or four days or something like that yeah that's an interesting use case too yeah definitely curious to see also if there are other collections or other fields that you'd like to see support for that are not shown here please let us know so we can make sure that those are sort of prioritized i did notice that we got one question in here from tidyapp how do you deal with refund with apple pay we're having issues with negative numbers so the payments that you receive with apple pay through stripe you should be able to refund the same way that you would refund any other payment you can do that directly through the dashboard or with the api i'm not quite sure what you mean by negative with with negative numbers would love to yeah could you add a little bit more context there or and also we also have engineers that staff discord a discord live chat in business hours globally around the world so if you head over to stripe.com go slash developer dash chat i'll add that in the comments here in a second we'd be more than happy to to chat with you yeah definitely but apple pay should generally be like it's just like any other card transaction ideally yeah yep cool i think i think we can wrap it right there thank you so much for watching thanks charles for joining me and uh yeah well uh if you have any interest in using the stripe search api please let us know and we'll we'll add the contact information down in the description of the video and this will be up on youtube and available throughout the beta so you can also reach out on twitter our handles are available there on screen and uh yeah hope you have a great day cheers bye everyone

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