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🛠️ How to populate creator fields such as createdBy and updatedBy

🏗 Work in progress

The content of this page might not be fully up-to-date with Strapi 5 yet.

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.

Only the following fields will be populated: id, firstname, lastname, username, preferedLanguage, createdAt, and updatedAt.

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. Create a new route middleware either using the generate CLI or by manually creating a new file in ./src/api/[content-type-name]/middlewares/[your-middleware-name].js

  5. Add the following piece of code, you can modify this example to suit your needs:

    ./src/api/test/middlewares/defaultTestPopulate.js
    "use strict";

    module.exports = (config, { strapi }) => {
      return async (ctx, next) => {
        if (!ctx.query.populate) {
          ctx.query.populate = ["createdBy", "updatedBy"];
        }

        await next();
      };
    };

  6. Modify your default route factory to enable this middleware on the specific routes you want this population to apply to and replacing the content-type/middleware name with yours:

    ./src/api/test/routes/test.js
    "use strict";

    const { createCoreRouter } = require("@strapi/strapi").factories;

    module.exports = createCoreRouter("api::test.test", {
      config: {
        find: {
          middlewares: ["api::test.default-test-populate"],
        },
        findOne: {
          middlewares: ["api::test.default-test-populate"],
        },
      },
    });

REST API requests with no populate parameter will include the createdBy or updatedBy fields by default.