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Query Anywhere with Stitch

You can query data stored in MongoDB directly from your client application code with the MongoDB query language. Data access rules defined on the Stitch server for each MongoDB collection let you securely filter results based on the logged in user or the content of each document.

Query MongoDB

The employees collection contains documents describing each employee in an example company. Each document includes the employee’s name, email, role, salary, and information on the employee’s manager. In the following example, we query the employees collection for all documents and display the formatted results in a table.

Live Example

Try uncommenting the limit and sort read options in the query. The results displayed in the table should update to reflect your changes.

Protect Data with Rules

You may not want to allow every employee to see the data of every other employee. We can use collection rules to control the data that each user can access without changing the query pattern.

For the following example, we’ve copied all of the employees collection data into a new collection named direct_reports. This collection is protected by a MongoDB Service rule that only allows a query to return documents that describe the logged in user or one of their direct reports.

These conditions are configured as two separate roles, isThisPerson and isManager, that are evaluated relative to the logged in user on each query. The assigned role is determined by the following apply_when expressions:

HR.direct_reports Roles
// "apply_when" for the `isThisPerson` role
{ "email": "%%user.data.email" }

// "apply_when" for the `isManager` role
{ "manager.email": "%%user.data.email" }

If the logged in user’s email address matches the value in the email field of a document, that document describes the user so we allow them to read it. We also allow users to read documents that describe their direct reports, i.e. when the user’s email matches the manager.email field. If neither of these conditions are met for a specific document, Stitch transparently withholds that document from the user.

../../_images/direct-reports-rules.png

Live Example

Try changing the logged in user in the initializeClient function to jane.schmoe@company.com. You should see a different set of direct reports listed in the table.