GAE Datastore (Golang): Filter Query When Adding New DB Field

I'm running a GAE Golang application that's working with datastore. I have a struct which translates to a DB model on datastore, and I have added a new field to the struct, call it NewField (type string)

Existing instances ("rows" in the DB) for this struct have this NewField missing of course, which is expected.

I'm looking to create a query that will return all instances with where this NewField is missing (the existing instances).

This is what I tried:

q := datastore.NewQuery("MyModel")
q = q.Filter("NewField =", "")

However this doesn't seem to work.

Any ideas on how to achieve this?

The bad news is that you can't.

Every query on GAE Datastore operates on an index. Since you just added the new property, existing entities without that property will not be in any indices (that includes that property). What you would need is to loop over entities with no index records, but that is not possible.

Your best bet is to query all entities, and do the filtering / update manually in Go code, where the NewField field has the zero value. Once you re-save existing entities, the new property will get indexed, and you will be able to search / filter by that property in the future.

If by any chance your entities store the creation time or last updated time (in a property), then you may use that: filter by last updated time to list only entities where the timestamp is less than the time when you added the new property to your Go model.

Another option (for future changes) is to add a "version" property to your entities. Whenever you perform a model update, increment the version for new entities. And you can always query entities with old versions (or with a specific version).