CUE orders all values in a value lattice. A value more at the top of a hierarchy is what programming languages would refer to as a type. Concrete value or constraints on such a “type” are all instances of that type.

In other words, CUE constraints can be used to find patterns in data. cue vet is a simple instance of this.

But more elaborate querying in the form of a find or query subcommand is certainly possible. We would love to hear about your envisioned use cases to plan out such a subcommand.

Programmatic Querying

In the mean time, you can query data programmatically using the CUE API. What you will need to do is

• load data and constraints using cuelang.org/go/cue.Runtime or cuelang.org/go/cue/load.Instances.
• Walk over data using cuelang.org/go/cue.Value’s Walk method or look up specific values.
• call pattern.Subsumes(value), where pattern and value are cue.Values to see if value is an instance of pattern.