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🛠️ How to populate creator fields such as createdBy and updatedBy

The creator fields createdBy and updatedBy are removed from the REST API response by default. These 2 fields can be returned in the REST API by activating the populateCreatorFields parameter at the content-type level.

✏️ Note

The populateCreatorFields property is not available to the GraphQL API.

To add createdBy and updatedBy to the API response:

  1. Open the content-type schema.json file.

  2. Add "populateCreatorFields": true to the options object:

    "options": {
        "draftAndPublish": true,
        "populateCreatorFields": true
      },

  3. Save the schema.json.

  4. Open the controller [collection-name].js file inside the corresponding API request.

  5. Add the following piece of code, and make sure you replace the [collection-name].js with proper collection name:

    'use strict';
    /**
     *  [collection-name] controller
     */
    const { createCoreController } = require('@strapi/strapi').factories;
    module.exports = createCoreController('api::[collection-name].[collection-name]', ({ strapi }) => ({
      async find(ctx) {
        // Calling the default core action
        const { data, meta } = await super.find(ctx);
        const query = strapi.db.query('api::[collection-name].[collection-name]');
        await Promise.all(
          data.map(async (item, index) => {
            const foundItem = await query.findOne({
              where: {
                id: item.id,
              },
              populate: ['createdBy', 'updatedBy'],
            });

            data[index].attributes.createdBy = {
              id: foundItem.createdBy.id,
              firstname: foundItem.createdBy.firstname,
              lastname: foundItem.createdBy.lastname,
            };
            data[index].attributes.updatedBy = {
              id: foundItem.updatedBy.id,
              firstname: foundItem.updatedBy.firstname,
              lastname: foundItem.updatedBy.lastname,
            };
          })
        );
        return { data, meta };
      },
    }));

REST API requests using the populate parameter that include the createdBy or updatedBy fields will now populate these fields.