Filtering a collection

The filter query string parameter allows clients to filter a collection of Items that are returned by a request. The expression specified with filter is evaluated for each resource in the collection, and only Items where the expression evaluates to true are included in the response. Items with expressions that evaluates to false or null, or Items that reference properties that are unavailable, are omitted from the response.

OneDrive API supports only the following subset of the official OData 4.0 filter syntax grammar.

Note: Samples omit proper URL encoding for readability. Actual filter syntax usage must be URL encoded.

Example: return all Products whose Price is less than $10.00

GET /Products?filter=Price lt 10.00

The value of the filter option is a Boolean expression.

Supported operators

OneDrive API supports the following set of operations in the filter syntax.

Operator Description Example
eq Equal city eq 'Redmond'
ne Not equal city ne 'London'
gt Greater than price gt 20
ge Greater than or equal price ge 10
lt Less than price lt 20
le Less than or equal price le 10
and Logical and price le 200 and price gt 3.5
or Logical or price le 3.5 or price gt 200
( ) Precedence grouping (priority eq 1 or city eq 'Redmond') and price gt 100

Operator precedence

Operators for the filter syntax are evaluated in the following order, from highest to lowest. Operators in the same group/category have equal precedence and are evaluated from left-to-right.

Group Operator Description
Grouping ( ) Precedence grouping
Relational gt Greater than
ge Greater than or equal
lt Less than
le Less than or equal
Equality eq Equal
ne Not equal
Conditional AND and Logical and
Conditional OR or Logical or

Filterable properties

While the filter syntax can be used on any property of an item, we have optimized certain properties to be fast and efficient to filter on.

Note: In OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server 2016, filtering support only name and url properties.

  • audio
  • createdDateTime (for gt, ge, lt, le)
  • deleted
  • file
  • folder
  • image
  • lastModifiedDateTime (for gt, ge, lt, le)
  • video

Filtering on other properties which are not optimized can result in the following behaviors:

  • Higher API latency (longer return time for response)
  • Empty pages (no items in the value collection but an odata.nextLink property for the next page)


Below is an example of filtering search results for only items that have a file and image facet.


GET /drive/root/search(q='vacation')?filter=image%20ne%20null%20and%20file%20ne%20null


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-type: application/json

    "value": [
        "id": "0123456789abc!123",
        "name": "Vacation.jpg",
        "image": { },
        "file": { },
          "onClickTelemetryUrl": "!123"
        "id": "0123456789abc!456",
        "name": "Summer.jpg",
        "image": { },
        "file": { },
          "onClickTelemetryUrl": "!456"
    "@search.approximateCount": 12,
    "@odata.nextLink": "!asd"