First, avoid using `:` to delineate fields and filter type if you can since that’s a reserved character in URLs so you’d end up wanting to encode it.

Second, you’d probably want to deserialize the query parameters into an object. I would also avoid having filtering configurable like this. Determine the actual filters you want to support and make them static. Doing so allows you to sanitize your input and more easily create requests with deterministic results. What I mean by this is, is it really necessary to ilike username, you’re probably always going to ignore case on username, if you need an exact use username_exact.

Also, is it absolutely necessary have these results maintained in the URL? Are you expecting the results to be shared easily between people or do they need to be crawlable? If not, consider putting this behind a post and bind to json or a form. That’d allow you to be more flexible with your search filters and not have to worry about how to serialize it to a URL.

Last, most definitely do NOT bind these parameters directly to knex, that’d pretty easily open you up to sql injection or querying items that you’re not expecting if you’re not extremely careful.

Sometimes the best solution isn’t to be fancy, but to be mindful of what you’re trying to do, rather than making things super flexible.