Creating an index for all active items - faunadb

Question

I have a collection of documents that follow this schema {label: String, status: Number}.
I want to introduce a new field, deleted_at: Date that will hold information if a document has already been deleted. Seems like a perfect use case for an index, to be able to search for all undeleted tasks.
CreateIndex({
name: "activeTasks",
source: Collection("tasks"),
terms: [
{ field: ["data", "deleted_at"] }
]
})
And then filter by undefined / null value in shell:
Paginate(Match(Index("activeTasks"), null))
Paginate(Match(Index("activeTasks"), undefined))
It returns nothing, even for documents where I explicitly set deleted_at to null.
That's not my point, though. I want to get documents that do not have the deleted_at defined at all, so that I do not have to update the whole collection.
PS. When I add document where deleted: "test" and query for it, the shell does return the expected result.
What do I don't get?

Answer 1

The reason is because FaunaDB doesn't support reading empty/null value the way you think it does. You need to use a special Bindings to do that.
Make sure to check out https://docs.fauna.com/fauna/current/tutorials/indexes/bindings.html#empty for a more thorough explanation and examples.
My understanding of how bindings work would yield the following code. I haven't tested it though and I'm not sure it works.
You need a special binding index:
CreateIndex({
name: "activeTasks",
source: [{
collection: Collection("tasks"),
fields: {
null_deleted_at: Query(
Lambda(
"doc",
Equals(Select(["data", "deleted_at"], Var("doc"), null), null)
)
)
}
}],
terms: [ {binding: "null_deleted_at"} ],
})
Usage:
Map(
Paginate(Match(Index("activeTasks"), true)),
Lambda("X", Get(Var("X")))
)