MongoDB: How to get the object names in collection? - mongodb

Question

and think you in advance for the help. I have recently started using mongoDB for some personal project and I'm interested in finding a better way to query my data.
My question is: I have the following collection:
{
"_id" : ObjectId("5dbd77f7a204d21119cfc758"),
"Toyota" : {
"Founder" : "Kiichiro Toyoda",
"Founded" : "28 August 1937",
"Subsidiaries" : [
"Lexus",
"Daihatsu",
"Subaru",
"Hino"
]
}
}
{
"_id" : ObjectId("5dbd78d3a204d21119cfc759"),
"Volkswagen" : {
"Founder" : "German Labour Front",
"Founded" : "28 May 1937",
"Subsidiaries" : [
"Audi",
"Volkswagen",
"Skoda",
"SEAT"
]
}
}
I want to get the object name for example here I want to return
[Toyota, Volkswagen]
I have use this method
var names = {}
db.cars.find().forEach(function(doc){Object.keys(doc).forEach(function(key){names[key]=1})});
names;
which gave me the following result:
{ "_id" : 1, "Toyota" : 1, "Volkswagen" : 1 }
however, is there a better way to get the same result and also to just return the names of the objects. Thank you.

Answer 1

I would suggest you to change the schema design to be something like:
{
_id: ...,
company: {
name: 'Volkswagen',
founder: ...,
subsidiaries: ...,
...<other fields>...
}
You can then use the aggregation framework to achieve a similar result:
> db.test.find()
{ "_id" : 0, "company" : { "name" : "Volkswagen", "founder" : "German Labour Front" } }
{ "_id" : 1, "company" : { "name" : "Toyota", "founder" : "Kiichiro Toyoda" } }
> db.test.aggregate([ {$group: {_id: null, companies: {$push: '$company.name'}}} ])
{ "_id" : null, "companies" : [ "Volkswagen", "Toyota" ] }
For more details, see:
Aggregation framework
$group
Accumulator operators
As a bonus, you can create an index on the company.name field, whereas you cannot create an index on varying field names like in your example.