Using "$count" Within an "addField" Operation in MongoDB Aggregation - mongodb

Question

I am trying to find the correct combination of aggregation operators to add a field titled "totalCount" to my mongoDB view.
This will get me the count at this particular stage of the aggregation pipeline and output this as the result of a count on each of the documents:
{
$count: "count"
}
But I then end up with one document with this result, rather than what I'm trying to accomplish, which is to make this value print out as an addedField that is a field/value on all of the documents, or even better, a value that prints in addition to the returned documents.
I've tried this but it gives me an error ""Unrecognized expression '$count'",":
{
$addFields: {
"totalCount" : { $count: "totalCount" }
}
}
What would the correct syntactical construction be for this? Is it possible to do it this way, or do I need to use $sum, or some other operator to make this work? I also tried this:
{
$addFields: {
"totalCount" : { $sum: { _id: 1 } }
}
},
... but while it doesn't give me any errors, it just prints 0 as the value for that field on every document rather than the total count of all documents.

Answer 1

Total count will always be a one-document result so you need $facet to run mutliple aggregation pipelines and then merge results. Let's say your regular pipeline contains simple $project and you want to merge it's results with $count. You can run below aggregation:
db.col.aggregate([
{
$facet: {
totalCount: [
{ $count: "value" }
],
pipelineResults: [
{
$project: { _id: 1 } // your regular aggregation pipeline here
}
]
}
},
{
$unwind: "$pipelineResults"
},
{
$unwind: "$totalCount"
},
{
$replaceRoot: {
newRoot: {
$mergeObjects: [ "$pipelineResults", { totalCount: "$totalCount.value" } ]
}
}
}
])
After $facet stage you'll get single document like this
{
"totalCount" : [
{
"value" : 3
}
],
"pipelineResults" : [
{
"_id" : ObjectId("5b313241120e4bc08ce87e46")
},
//....
]
}
Then you have to use $unwind to transform arrays into multiple documents and $replaceRoot with $mergeObjects to promote regular pipeline results into root level.

Answer 2

Since mongoDB version 5.0 there is another option, that allows to avoid the disadvantage of $facet, the grouping of all returned document into a one big document. The main concern is that a document as a size limit of 16M. Using $setWindowFields allows to avoid this concern
This can simply replace #micki's 4 steps:
db.col.aggregate([
{$setWindowFields: {output: {totalCount: {$count: {}}}}}
])