PQL filters are silently ignored on self-hosted CE — filtered queries return the FULL result set with HTTP 200

[addhass]

Affected: plane-mcp-server 0.2.9 and 0.2.10 (SDK plane.api.work_items). Tested against self-hosted Plane Community Edition v1.3.1, API-key auth (X-Api-Key).

Dedup note: distinct from #136 (search param), #170/#172/#188 (*-lite 404s) and #183 (state silently ignored on update). Those either 404 or ignore one field. This one returns HTTP 200 with a complete, plausible, wrong result set for any filtered read. I couldn't find an existing PQL issue.

Summary

Self-hosted CE does not implement the pql query parameter, and — like most DRF endpoints — it ignores unknown query params rather than rejecting them. So every PQL-filtered call returns the entire unfiltered set with HTTP 200.

The MCP actively advertises PQL: list_work_items/count_work_items document it, and there's a dedicated get_pql_reference tool. An agent therefore composes a filter, gets a confident 200, and reasons over data that was never filtered.

Reproduction

Workspace with 113 work items in one project, most of them Done:

BASE=https://<self-hosted>/api/v1/workspaces/<slug>
PROJ=<project-uuid>

# 1. no filter
curl -sLG -H "x-api-key: $KEY" --data-urlencode 'fields=id' \
  "$BASE/projects/$PROJ/work-items/" | jq .total_count
# => 113

# 2. filter to open states only
curl -sLG -H "x-api-key: $KEY" \
  --data-urlencode 'pql=stateGroup IN openStates()' --data-urlencode 'fields=id' \
  "$BASE/projects/$PROJ/work-items/" | jq .total_count
# => 113   (expected: far fewer; most items are Done)

# 3. deliberately INVALID pql
curl -sLG -H "x-api-key: $KEY" \
  --data-urlencode 'pql=((((not valid' --data-urlencode 'fields=id' \
  "$BASE/projects/$PROJ/work-items/" | jq .total_count
# => 113   HTTP 200

Step 3 is the important one: syntactically broken PQL still succeeds. There is no server-side validation to fail against, so nothing distinguishes "filter applied" from "filter discarded".

Same via the MCP tools:

• list_work_items(project_id=…, pql='stateGroup IN openStates()') → returns Done items.
• list_work_items(project_id=…, pql='childOf("DS-111")') → returns all 113 items, including every unrelated one.
• count_work_items(pql=…) → 404s separately (workspace-scoped endpoint, likely the same family as list_projects and get_workspace_members call Cloud-only *-lite endpoints → HTTP 404 on self-hosted Community Edition #188).

Why this one bites harder than a 404

A 404 is self-announcing. This isn't. In our case an agent searched for an existing ticket, got a filtered-looking result set, concluded the ticket didn't exist, and filed a duplicate. Nothing in the response indicated the filter had been dropped. (Our search was also returning empty because of #136 on 0.2.9, so the two compounded — but the PQL behaviour stands on its own.)

Suggested fix — any one of these

1. Preferred: probe capability once per session and fail loudly if pql is passed to a backend that doesn't implement it (raise with a message pointing at client-side filtering).
2. Have the server reject unknown/unsupported query params with 400 instead of ignoring them.
3. If CE genuinely won't support PQL (cf. Is the Community Edition a supported target? #171), drop pql from the tool schemas when the target isn't Cloud, so agents never compose one.

Option 1 is what we've done locally as a stopgap: a guard in prepare_work_item_params — the single choke point every PQL-carrying call passes through (list, list_workspace, list_archived, count_workspace, plus the cycle/module list variants) — raising a ValueError explaining that the caller should omit pql and filter client-side using expand=state.

if payload.get("pql"):
    raise ValueError(_PQL_UNSUPPORTED)

Happy to open a PR for option 1 if that's a direction you'd take.

Environment

plane-mcp-server	0.2.9 (also present in 0.2.10)
Plane	Community Edition v1.3.1, self-hosted
Auth	API key (X-Api-Key)
Transport	stdio