Retrieve documents#

In this tutorial we will retrieve some of the current data from a data contract. Data is stored in the form of documents as described in the Dash Platform Protocol Document explanation.

Prerequisites#

Code#

document-retrieve.mjs#
import { setupDashClient } from '../setupDashClient.mjs';

const { sdk } = await setupDashClient();

// Default tutorial contract (testnet). Replace or override via DATA_CONTRACT_ID.
const DATA_CONTRACT_ID =
  process.env.DATA_CONTRACT_ID ||
  'FW3DHrQiG24VqzPY4ARenMgjEPpBNuEQTZckV8hbVCG4';

try {
  const results = await sdk.documents.query({
    dataContractId: DATA_CONTRACT_ID,
    documentTypeName: 'note',
    limit: 2,
  });

  for (const [id, doc] of results) {
    console.log('Document:', id.toString(), doc.toJSON());
  }
} catch (e) {
  console.error('Something went wrong:\n', e.message);
}

Queries#

The example code uses a very basic query to return only two results. More extensive querying capabilities are covered in the query syntax reference.

Example Document#

The following examples show the structure of a note document returned from the SDK. The values returned by .toJSON() include the base document properties (prefixed with $) present in all documents along with the data contract defined properties (the message propoerty in the example document).

Note

Note: When using .toJSON(), binary data is displayed as a base64 string (since JSON is a text-based format).

 {
  "$id": "5CL7qwbGPi4P6jqhat5pQxzSZ9PPxvNkDU8tU9yXYyzt",
  "$ownerId": "FKZZFDTfGdSWUmL2g7H9e46pMJMPQp9DHQcvjrsS6884",
  "$revision": 1,
  "$createdAt": null,
  "$updatedAt": null,
  "$transferredAt": null,
  "$createdAtBlockHeight": null,
  "$updatedAtBlockHeight": null,
  "$transferredAtBlockHeight": null,
  "$createdAtCoreBlockHeight": null,
  "$updatedAtCoreBlockHeight": null,
  "$transferredAtCoreBlockHeight": null,
  "$creatorId": null,
  "$dataContractId": "FW3DHrQiG24VqzPY4ARenMgjEPpBNuEQTZckV8hbVCG4",
  "$type": "note",
  "$entropy": "jsO295ymKBeMAiAwrSsaDX7qjYD/9i+Q8g9MIDx/xik="
  "message": "Tutorial Test @ Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:37:48 GMT",
}

What’s happening#

After we initialize the Client, we request documents using sdk.documents.query(). The method takes an object with the dataContractId, documentTypeName, and optional query parameters like where, orderBy, limit, startAt, and startAfter.

Results are returned as a Map where each key is a document ID and each value is the document object. We iterate over the entries using for (const [id, doc] of results).

If you need more than the default number of documents, use the startAt or startAfter parameters for pagination.

Tip

See this in an example app: Dashnote — Read path: queries first and DashMint Lab — Read path: queries first.