Querying MP api with Boolean operator "OR"

Materials Project
1

Hello,

in this post MP API queries using boolean search it was stated that there is no “or” boolean operator in the MP api query, specifically concerning the elements included in the resulting compounds. I was wondering: has the situation changed meanwhile (one year passed)?
My problem is that I need to implement a query involving a rather complex combination of multiple “and” and “or”, hence doing it as suggested in the above mentioned post (multiple queries with “exclude_elements”) is impractical and slow.
Any suggestion on how to query MP for compounds containing, say ( (“F” OR “Cl” OR “Br”) AND (“Li” OR “Fe”) ) without doing 6 separate queries?
Thank You!

2

Hey @MaterialGabri, thanks for reaching out! As you allude to, the include/exclude_elements query parameters are not efficient enough for complex combinations and are really only in place to allow simpler interactive lookups through the Materials Explorer. However, the summary collection is relatively small and should be pretty quick to retrieve in its entirety. So my suggestion would be to retrieve everything you need, save it to disk on your machine, and filter out compounds locally as needed. Tagging @munrojm in case he has any extra or different guidance.