Pocketbase and Getting Items - Part 1

When using the JS Web API for searching records, there are different ways of requesting records from the Pocketbase instance. Today, I want to highlight a certain aspect of these collection-based list operations, so that you might find the most suitable approach for your use case.

Use Case: Event Registration Management

Imagine the following use case: I have a website that displays events, i.e., assemblies or gatherings of people for a common cause. If the users of that website, as event organizers, create events and other users want to attend, the latter can participate by submitting their event registration.

First attempt with getFirstListItem

For this, I implemented a dialog in which users can register for the event. Now, if they are already signed in, I wanted to display a specific message like Thank you for your registration, you have already signed in to the event. For this, I used the method getFirstListItem to check if a registration is already present in the Pocketbase database, indicating the currently signed-in user is registered for the event. If so, the informational message would be displayed to the user.

However, I quickly found out that this only really works for this single case. If there are no registrations yet, an error would be thrown. In my Nuxt-based project, this led to displaying an HTTP 404 error message to the user.

After referring to the documentation, I found out that getFirstListItem throws an error if the requested resource is not found:

/**
 * Returns the first found item by the specified filter.
 *
 * Internally it calls `getList(1, 1, { filter, skipTotal })` and
 * returns the first found item.
 *
 * You can use the generic T to supply a wrapper type of the crud model.
 *
 * For consistency with `getOne`, this method will throw a 404
 * ClientResponseError if no item was found.
 *
 * @throws {ClientResponseError}
 */

So this is suitable for an entirely different use case, namely if you want to make sure that the requested record does exist and, if it doesn't, handle that appropriately.

Long story short: use getFirstListItem if the record should exist and the opposite case is something to be concerned about and needs our meticulous attention.

A better alternative

First, I switched to the method getList and configured it to get only a single item for this request. Then I applied the general error handling recommendation mentioned in the docs here. This resolved my issues perfectly, because, even if I applied the same error handling and used the getFirstListItem approach, errors would be thrown where I would not expect them. The method getList will just return an empty array if nothing was found, which can be dealt with more gracefully.

So use getList, check if the resulting array of records is empty or not, and you will not have to deal with errors that are unnecessarily thrown. Here, both having a record or still missing one are equally important cases.

Note: This is not a general advice to replace getFirstListItem; it is merely meant as a more suitable option for this use case.

Thanks for checking in. See you next time!

~ jacky