documentsBy

Documentsby is a term used in information management and software development to describe a pattern for retrieving documents based on one or more attributes. It is not a formal standard; rather, it is a naming convention observed in codebases, APIs, and data access layers to express a query that returns documents matching a given criterion.

In code, a function or method may be named documentsBy and accept a field name and value, or provide specialized variants such as documentsByAuthor or documentsByTag. In RESTful APIs, a similar concept appears as query parameters like /documents?author=... or /documents?tag=..., which filter the document collection by the specified attribute.

Design considerations include ensuring the field being filtered is indexed for performance; validating inputs to prevent injection; deciding whether to support single versus multiple criteria; and implementing pagination and sorting to manage result sets.

Related patterns include findBy and queryBy in ORM frameworks, and GraphQL filtering. The term is generic, and its exact behavior depends on the surrounding software stack. In practice, documentsby-like patterns aim to provide clear, reusable access to document collections by common metadata, fostering consistency across data access layers.