# Node-RED unable to find Discovery Collection

**URL:** <https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-unable-to-find-discovery-collection/9699>\
**Category:** General\
**Created:** [2 April 2019 16:42 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-unable-to-find-discovery-collection/9699 "2019-04-02T16:42:32Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nhar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/f04885/32.png) [@nhar](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/nhar)\
**Post date:** [2 April 2019 16:42 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-unable-to-find-discovery-collection/9699/1 "2019-04-02T16:42:32Z")

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I have an environment set up in Node-RED which has two collections. When I use the 'list-collections' property of the Discovery node it returns an empty array.

I can see that the collections are present in the environment (it reads Collections: 2 / 100) and the 'environment-details' section of the Discovery node works perfectly fine with the same environment. The debug node is outputting 'msg.collections' as it should, but it still returns just an empty array.

Does anybody have any idea what the issue might be here?

Thanks.

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**Author:** ![TotallyInformation](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex026/user_avatar/discourse.nodered.org/totallyinformation/32/31_2.png) [@TotallyInformation](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/TotallyInformation)\
**Post date:** [8 April 2019 20:39 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-unable-to-find-discovery-collection/9699/2 "2019-04-08T20:39:14Z")

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> [@nhar](#):
>
> collections

??? What are these?

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**Author:** ![chughts](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex026/user_avatar/discourse.nodered.org/chughts/32/139_2.png) [@chughts](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/chughts)\
**Post date:** [15 April 2019 09:30 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-unable-to-find-discovery-collection/9699/3 "2019-04-15T09:30:02Z")

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I am unable to reproduce. In my test system, I can list collections for a given environment?  
You need to specify an environment, and there are two ways to do this. First is to use the configuration panel. Second is to set `msg.discoveryparams.environment_id`. If this is set then that takes precedence over the configuration panel.

How did you create the collection?  
What version of the nodes are you using - current latest is 0.7.8 ?  
What version of node-red are you running?

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**Author:** ![knolleary](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex026/user_avatar/discourse.nodered.org/knolleary/32/3_2.png) [@knolleary](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/knolleary)\
**Post date:** [15 April 2019 09:44 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-unable-to-find-discovery-collection/9699/4 "2019-04-15T09:44:34Z")

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The missing information here is that this is a question regarding the Watson Discovery service running in IBM Cloud. Thankfully @chughts has stepped in already.

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**Author:** ![nhar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/f04885/32.png) [@nhar](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/nhar)\
**Post date:** [15 April 2019 14:21 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/node-red-unable-to-find-discovery-collection/9699/5 "2019-04-15T14:21:15Z")

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I created the collection through the discovery service itself. As far as I'm aware I'm using the latest version of the nodes/node-red - I'm not sure how to check but it's the one hosted through the node-red interface itself if that helps at all.

I'm not entirely sure why, but importing the entire node-red instance to a new account seems to have fixed the problem, even though it's the same configuration - there were a fair few instances open on the original account so I think it's possible that I was doing something stupid in regards to them, or possibly the environment id as you suggested. Thank you so much for your help - so sorry for the trouble.