Querying with GlideQuery

I've been using GlideRecord for the past nine years. The time has come to move on and experiment with GlideQuery. This post will show you how to run a query using GlideQuery.

The goal

Return all incident numbers with a high priority (P1).

With GlideRecord

var gr = new GlideRecord('incident');
gr.addQuery('priority', 1);
gr.query();
while (gr.next()) {
  gs.info(gr.number);
}

This works, but it's verbose and imperative — you're telling the platform how to do it rather than what you want.

With GlideQuery

What I like about GlideQuery is that it reads more like SQL. If I wanted to express the same query in SQL it would look like this:

SELECT number
FROM incident
WHERE priority = 1

Here is the equivalent in GlideQuery:

new GlideQuery('incident')
  .where('priority', 1)
  .select('number')
  .forEach(function(incident) {
    gs.info(incident.number);
  });

Why GlideQuery is better

• Readable — the intent is clear at a glance
• Chainable — conditions and projections are composed fluently
• Safer — it avoids some of the common GlideRecord pitfalls (like forgetting .query())
• SQL-like — if you know SQL, the mental model transfers immediately

GlideQuery is available from the Orlando release onwards. If you're still writing GlideRecord for every query, it's worth making the switch.