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Egor
Egor

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🐝 How a Simple Supabase RPC Function Cleaned Up My Frontend Logic

#supabase #nextjs #postgres #rpc

A few days ago, while building a beekeeping management platform, I hit a small but annoying wall 👨‍💻.

We track honey batches uploaded by different beekeepers 🍯.
Each batch record has its sender’s email, while the sold honey records just reference a batch by ID — no email field there 😓.

When I started building the “Sold Honey” page, I realized:

“How do I show only the sales belonging to the logged-in user if sold_honey doesn’t even have an email?”

At first, I thought I’d just pull everything from Supabase and filter client-side.
But that quickly felt messy and inefficient — especially with pagination 💦.

That’s when I remembered 🔥: Supabase lets you write RPC (Postgres) functions.
They’re like serverless endpoints that live right inside your database.

✨ The Fix

Instead of sending multiple queries or writing big joins in React (Next.js), I created a tiny SQL function get_sold_honey_by_email that joins both tables internally and filters by email.

create or replace function get_sold_honey_by_email(p_email text)
returns setof sold_honey as $$
  select s.*
  from sold_honey s
  join honey_batches h on s.honey_batch_id = h.id
  where h.sender_email = p_email
  order by s.id desc;
$$ language sql;
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That’s it — no sensitive fields, no extra logic in the frontend 👍.

⚛️ One Simple Call in Next.js 

const { data, error } = await supabase.rpc("get_sold_honey_by_email", {
  p_email: user.email,
});
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Done. I get back only the user’s data, already filtered and ready to render.

No where clauses in React, no accidental overfetching, no extra stress.

🥳🎉

💡 What I Learned

  • Supabase RPCs are perfect for moving business logic closer to your data.
  • They keep your frontend clean and your backend predictable.
  • Pagination, filtering, even validations — they can all live inside the database.

This small win made my data flow so much simpler that I started refactoring other pages the same way.
Sometimes the cleanest frontend is just a smart SQL function away 💛

Built with Supabase + Next.js on a real-world beekeeping data project 🐝
If you’re exploring Supabase, try writing one RPC function today — it might surprise you how much cleaner your code feels.

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