--- title: AQL object literal simplification - ArangoDB description: ArangoDB’s devel branch recently saw a change that makes writing some AQL queries a bit simpler. The change introduces an optional shorthand notation for object attributes in the style of ES6’s enhanced object literal notation. For example, consider the following query that groups values by age attribute and counts the number of documents per distinct… --- ArangoDB 3.12 Product Release Announcement! Read the blog for details. 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The change introduces an optional shorthand notation for object attributes in the style of ES6’s enhanced object literal notation. For example, consider the following query that groups values by `age` attribute and counts the number of documents per distinct `age` value: ``` FOR doc IN collection COLLECT age = doc.age WITH COUNT INTO length RETURN { age: age, length: length } ``` The object declaration in the last line of the query is somewhat redundant because one has to type identical attribute names and values: ``` RETURN { age: age, length: length } ``` In this case, the new shorthand notation simplifies the `RETURN` to: ``` RETURN { age, length } ``` In general, the shorthand notation can be used for all object literals when there is an attribute name that refers to a query variable of the same name. It can also be mixed with the longer notation, e.g.: ``` RETURN { age, length, dateCreated: DATE_NOW() } ``` [Twitter](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://blog.arangodb.com/blog/2015/07/aql-object-literal-simplification) [LinkedIn](http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://blog.arangodb.com/blog/2015/07/aql-object-literal-simplification) [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/share?url=https://blog.arangodb.com/blog/2015/07/aql-object-literal-simplification) [Yahoo](https://plus.google.com/share?url=https://blog.arangodb.com/blog/2015/07/aql-object-literal-simplification%3Futm_medium%3Dsocial%26utm_source%3Dgoogle_plus) ![Picture of Jan Steemann](https://blog.arangodb.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/Authors/Jan-Steemann-100x100.webp) July 28, 2015 , [Jan Steemann](https://blog.arangodb.com/blog/author/jan-steemann) After more than 30 years of playing around with 8 bit computers, assembler and scripting languages, Jan decided to move on to work in database engineering. Jan is now a senior C/C++ developer with the ArangoDB core team, being there from version 0.1. He is mostly working on performance optimization, storage engines and the querying functionality. 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