Advanced Recipe Search

Welcome back! In the last lesson, you learned how to build basic endpoints to retrieve recipes from your database, including fetching a single recipe by its ID and listing recipes with pagination. These are the building blocks of any recipe API.

Now, let’s take things a step further. Imagine you open a cooking app and want to find recipes that use only the ingredients you have in your kitchen. Or maybe you want to see the steps of a recipe as a list so you can follow them one by one. These features make your app much more helpful and user-friendly.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to:

• Search for recipes by a list of ingredients.
• Return recipe steps as an array, not just a long string.

These skills will help you build a smarter, more flexible recipe API.

Before we dive in, let’s quickly remind ourselves how our data is organized. This will help you understand how searching and filtering work.

With Prisma, your models are defined in the schema.prisma file. Here’s a simplified look at the relevant models:

model Ingredient {
  id      Int      @id @default(autoincrement())
  name    String
  recipes RecipeIngredient[]
}

model Recipe {
  id          Int      @id @default(autoincrement())
  name        String
  steps       String
  ingredients RecipeIngredient[]
  reviews     Review[]
}

model RecipeIngredient {
  recipe       Recipe     @relation(fields: [recipeId], references: [id], onDelete: Cascade)
  recipeId     Int
  ingredient   Ingredient @relation(fields: [ingredientId], references: [id], onDelete: Cascade)
  ingredientId Int

  @@id([recipeId, ingredientId])
}

• The RecipeIngredient model acts as a join table, connecting recipes and ingredients in a many-to-many relationship.
• Each Recipe can have many Ingredients, and each Ingredient can be used in many Recipes.
• The steps field on Recipe is a string containing all the steps, separated by newlines.

This structure is important for searching recipes by ingredients.

Many apps and websites want to show recipe steps one at a time, not as a single long string. To help with this, you can create an endpoint that returns the steps as an array.