# Steem Developer Portal

### JS: Search Accounts

By the end of this tutorial you should know how to call a list of user names from the steem blockchain

Full, runnable src of Search Accounts can be downloaded as part of the JS tutorials repository.

This tutorial will show the method of capturing a queried user name, matching that to the steem database and then displaying the matching names. This tutorial will be run on the `production server`.

## Intro

We are using the `call` function provided by the `dsteem` library to pull user names from the steem blockchain. The information being pulled is dependent on two variables:

1. The max number of user names that needs to be displayed by the search
2. The string representing the first characters of the user name you are searching for

A simple HTML interface is used to both capture the string query as well as display the completed search. The layout can be found in the “index.html” file.

## Steps

1. Configure connection Configuration of `dsteem` to use the proper connection and network.
2. Collecting input variables Assigning and collecting the necessary variables
3. Blockchain query Finding the data on the blockchain based on the inputs
4. Output Displaying query results

#### 1. Configure connection

Below we have `dsteem` pointing to the production network with the proper chainId, addressPrefix, and endpoint. There is a `public/app.js` file which holds the Javascript segment of this tutorial. In the first few lines we define the configured library and packages:

    const dsteem = require('dsteem');
    let opts = {};
    //connect to production server
    opts.addressPrefix = 'STM';
    opts.chainId =
    	'0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000';
    //connect to server which is connected to the network/production
    const client = new dsteem.Client('https://api.steemit.com');

#### 2. Collecting input variables

Next we assign the max number of lines that will be returned by the query. We also use `getElementById` to retrieve the requested user name for searching from the HTML interface. The `max` value can very easily also be attained from the HTML side simply by adding another input line in `index.html` and a second `getElementById` line.

    const max = 10;
    window.submitAcc = async () => {
        const accSearch = document.getElementById("username").value;

#### 3. Blockchain query

The next step is to pull the user names from the blockchain that matches the “username” variable that was retrieved. This is done using the `database.call` function and assigning the result to an array.

    const _accounts = await client.database.call('lookup_accounts',[accSearch, max]);
        console.log(`_accounts:`, _accounts);

#### 4. Output

Finally we create a list from the “_accounts” array generated in step 3.

    document.getElementById('accList').innerHTML = _accounts.join('<br>');
    }

## To run this tutorial

1. clone this repo
2. `cd tutorials/15_search_accounts`
3. `npm i`
4. `npm run dev-server` or `npm run start`
5. After a few moments, the server should be running at http://localhost:3000/