Is it possible to nest select expressions in jq?

I have this input data:

{
    "xs": [
        {
            "id": "a",
            "ts": "2023-01-03"
        },
        {
            "id": "b",
            "ts": "2023-01-01"
        },
        {
            "id": "c",
            "ts": "2023-01-02"
        }
    ]
}

I would like to select only element id=c because it is the first element, with a date greater than id=b‘s, if you sort the elements in xs by their ts field.

This works:

.xs | sort_by(.ts) | map(select(.ts > "2023-01-01")) | first

but I don’t want to hard code the date. I want to use another select to find it:

.xs | sort_by(.ts) | map(select(.ts > select(.id == "b").ts)) | first

that however returns the empty list.

Demo

>Solution :

Do it in two steps, store the temporary result in a variable and use it again in the next select()

.xs                                | 
sort_by(.ts)                       | 
( 
  map(select(.id == "b").ts) as $d | 
  map(select(.ts > $d[]))          | 
  first 
)

jqplay – demo