arangodb/Documentation/Books/Users/AqlExamples

!CHAPTER AQL Examples

This page contains some examples how to write queries in AQL. For better
understandability the query results are also included directly below each query.

!SECTION Simple queries

Following is a query that returns a string value. The result string is contained in a list
because the result of every valid query is a list:

```js
RETURN "this will be returned"
[ 
  "this will be returned" 
]
```

Here is a query that creates the cross products of two lists and runs a projection 
on it, using a few of AQL's built-in functions:

```js
FOR year in [ 2011, 2012, 2013 ]
  FOR quarter IN [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ]
    RETURN { 
      "y" : "year", 
      "q" : quarter, 
      "nice" : CONCAT(TO_STRING(quarter), "/", TO_STRING(year)) 
    }
[ 
  { "y" : "year", "q" : 1, "nice" : "1/2011" }, 
  { "y" : "year", "q" : 2, "nice" : "2/2011" }, 
  { "y" : "year", "q" : 3, "nice" : "3/2011" }, 
  { "y" : "year", "q" : 4, "nice" : "4/2011" }, 
  { "y" : "year", "q" : 1, "nice" : "1/2012" }, 
  { "y" : "year", "q" : 2, "nice" : "2/2012" }, 
  { "y" : "year", "q" : 3, "nice" : "3/2012" }, 
  { "y" : "year", "q" : 4, "nice" : "4/2012" }, 
  { "y" : "year", "q" : 1, "nice" : "1/2013" }, 
  { "y" : "year", "q" : 2, "nice" : "2/2013" }, 
  { "y" : "year", "q" : 3, "nice" : "3/2013" }, 
  { "y" : "year", "q" : 4, "nice" : "4/2013" } 
]
```