--- title: Getting started with the Search API beta slug: getting-started-with-the-search-api-beta published_at: 2021-10-04 15:00:17 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:53:08 +0000 summary: description: Learn how to use the new Search API and query language to search for activity and customers in your Stripe account. Now available in beta. Email search-api@stripe.com with your Stripe account ID to get started with the Search API beta. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 00:17 Find a customer from the Stripe Dashboard 01:00 Beta import statement specifics 01:41 Finding a customer with the existing list endpoint 04:12 Finding a customer with the new search endpoint 06:43 Finding payments with the new search endpoint 08:04 Conclusion ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88 #Stripe #Payments tags: [stripe, payments, search, beta, search api, @cjav_dev] views: 995 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/getting-started-with-the-search-api-beta youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAL0RnRYK1Y youtube_id: GAL0RnRYK1Y embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/GAL0RnRYK1Y thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GAL0RnRYK1Y/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Getting started with the Search API beta *Published: October 04, 2021* *Views: 995* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAL0RnRYK1Y) [![Getting started with the Search API beta](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GAL0RnRYK1Y/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAL0RnRYK1Y) ## Description Learn how to use the new Search API and query language to search for activity and customers in your Stripe account. Now available in beta. Email search-api@stripe.com with your Stripe account ID to get started with the Search API beta. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 00:17 Find a customer from the Stripe Dashboard 01:00 Beta import statement specifics 01:41 Finding a customer with the existing list endpoint 04:12 Finding a customer with the new search endpoint 06:43 Finding payments with the new search endpoint 08:04 Conclusion ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88 #Stripe #Payments ## Transcript in this episode you'll get a sneak peek at a pattern in the stripe api that allows you to look up objects in your account using a brand new search api we're still early days and we would love your feedback let's get into the demo from my stripe dashboard i want to look up a specific customer i might type in their email address which is find me at example.com and i can jump directly to the customer here on this customer object i can see their email address is find me at example.com and down at the bottom i see they have some metadata set up with a key of key and the value of def 987 so i can edit this metadata and add a brand new key and value for the metadata that i can use then to search and look up this customer later so i'm just going to say let's give the key a name and we'll say the value is find me and we will try to find this customer using the api now if we head over to vs code here from the editor we're looking at an import statement for a brand new npm module called stripe search beta this is a version of stripe node that we have customized for this search beta and we're passing in our secret key now after the beta you'll just require stripe node as usual and pass in your secret key right now the only two client libraries that have support for the search beta are stripe node and stripe java you can also test this out by directly passing some headers and all of that is available in the documentation now we've written a little bit of instrumentation here that says every time a request is fired to the stripe api we're going to log out that request this will let us see how many requests are actually firing now we have a find customers method here that we want to implement to try and find that customer that we edited in the dashboard what we might do is use a auto pagination feature of the list endpoint for customers to try to look up look through every single customer and find the one whose metadata matches what we what we created so we're going to say 408 const customer of stripe.customers.list and inside of this for loop we want to add to our list of customers we're going to say customers.push customer now before we add the customer to the list we want to check and make sure the metadata matches what we created in the dashboard so we're going to say if the customer metadata dot name is equal to find dash me then and only then should we add it to this list of customers now on by default this list endpoint is not going to have very big pages so we're going to pass in limit 100 which is the maximum so that we have large pages and we're going to look at 100 customers per api call now it turns out that in my account i have over 3 000 customers so this is going to fire off like 30 api requests so we're saying we're going to run this script and immediately we can see some of those requests that are firing off we can see the the get requests for customers with the limit parameter and the starting after is so that we can paginate through each of those customers now this is sometimes referred to as an n plus one problem where we actually or where we actually have to like look through every single object in the entire list of objects to find a specific customer here this is the problem that the search api is solving and so as we wait for all of these api calls to resolve we're realizing that this is actually taking over 30 seconds to look through all of our customer data it's very inefficient especially if you have way more customers i expect that you know the 3 000 customers in my demo account pales in comparison to your successful business so at the end here what i've got is a result that is an array that has a single object that we pushed onto it the the one customer that we wanted to find and we do see that the email is find dash me at example.com and we did match that metadata so that's what we were kind of looking for and this is how you would find a customer today with a list endpoint when you're looking for a customer by metadata now let's update this to use the brand new search api and see how this changes so the the code is actually going to be very similar i'm actually just going to copy and paste this so that we have reference so this is going to be the old list version and the new version is instead of passing list or instead of calling lists we're going to call search and instead of passing a limit we're going to pass in a brand new parameter called query so the search endpoint does still support limit and that's so that you can you can you can page through search results but you can also pass this query parameter that uses a query language that we're working on building out we would really love your feedback about the the different options that we're adding support for into the query language what we can do here is pass metadata with a key of name and the value of find dash me and instead of needing to do this if check here the only customers that will be returned are those that match this metadata key and value so if we save this and again recall that we had dozens of requests before we will rerun our script and there was just a single api call that was fired and we found the same exact customer so only one api call was fired and this is a new endpoint v1 search customers with this new query string parameter where we're using this new structured query language to pass in different different params and again we get back the same customer object that is exactly the one that we were looking for so if you're curious about what the structured query language looks like there's documentation that you can check out once you're part of the beta and as we scroll down here we can see how to install the beta libraries these are the headers that you want to pass if you're using curl to make a direct request once you are added into the beta we are able to also combine several filters so in addition to passing just the metadata with key and value you can also pass a combination with and or or including your currency you also have the possibility of negating specific fields uh there's a bunch of stuff that we're building in we really want your feedback about how uh how you like this search syntax so um you know passing field and value we're working on substring matching we've got greater than less than operators there's a whole bunch that you can do with the structured query language i wanted to show one more demo here and that is to find payments consider the case where you want to go through and you want to find all the payments where the amount is equal to one thousand dollars so maybe you know for sure that there was some transaction that happened on your stripe account that was worth exactly one thousand dollars you could do this uh this search here we're using now the payment intents api and we're searching by a specific amount of 1000 and or 1000 is the unit amount for the payment but not necessarily dollars and here we'll print out the currency the amount the status and the id so now we'll say node fine payments and now we can see all of those payments are sort of streaming out to the console some of these were not in usd some of them were in euros let's combine this operator to find payments with the amount 1000 with another operator to find the currency so we're going to say and currency is euros and we'll rerun this and now we're only seeing the 1 000 euro payments that we have in our account what's really cool is we can actually say show me all of the payments that are greater than 1000 euros and again now we're seeing some that were 3 000 1400 2000 etc we're really excited to bring this pattern to the api and we're keen to have your feedback and input help us drive the direction of the query language and the client libraries details for reaching out to contact us are in the description thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next time --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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