Ability to search for Blocks within Model structure

[lexi.pierson]

Currently, models form collections and each collection can have any number of blocks. Some blocks may be frequently used on every individual model in a collection. Other blocks, may be used sparingly throughout a collection.

If an issue is reported with a block, in order to find pages that a block is used on, you have to make a CDA playground query, where you query all pages for specific blocks. Then have to clean up the returned JSON afterwards to remove all pages that don’t contain that block type, search for the an identifying model field/ID the block was found on and it’s a somewhat tedious process that takes the user out of Dato.

It would be nice to be able to query the entire model collection for specific blocks being used, rather than just being able to search for text within all fields in blocks.

There was a similar post made about this topic in April of 2025. Including a link to this request.

[roger]

Hi @lexi.pierson,

Welcome to the forum, and thanks for this suggestion! It’s a good one. Please remember to vote on it in the upper left:

Also, our UX designer @m.balocco let me know that you’d previously filled out a survey about this issue, wherein you were trying to do a GraphQL lookup to find those usages’ URLs, but had to annoyingly filter through them in a text editor. I might able to help you modify that query to make that process a little less painful? If that would be helpful, would you please send me the details (the URL to the model collection in question, the fields/blocks you care about, etc.) either via DM here, or by email at r.tuan@datocms.com?)

That doesn’t invalidate the feature request at all! It’s just a temporary workaround until we are able to implement a better search.