How to Search Across Categories in Backendless Geoservice

The Backendless Geoservice supports a variety of ways to search for geopoints. So far we have reviewed how to search for geopoints in a radius or a rectangular area. There is also a partial match geopoint search. In addition to that, Backendless Console provides yet another way to search for data – the cross-category search. As the name suggests, this search lets you run SQL-based queries across multiple categories.

Enabling that search is very easy:

1. Login to Backendless Console, select an app and click the Geolocation icon.
2. Click the Cross-category search toggle in the upper right corner of the user interface.
3. Backendless Console hides the geocategories and now you can enter an SQL query to search for data. Assuming you added the sample geolocation data, enter the following query:

   city in ('AUSTIN', 'DALLAS')

4. The Console finds all geopoints that satisfy the query and displays them in both the data table and the map. The data table also shows the category each geopoint belongs to.