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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
  },
  1. Save the schema.json.
  2. 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
  3. 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();
  };
};
  1. 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.