MongoDB select documents where field1 equals nested.field2 in aggregate pipeline - mongodb

Question

I have joined two collections on one field using '$lookup', while actually I needed two fields to have a unique match. My next step would be to unwind the array containing different values of the second field I need for a unique match and then compare these to the value of the second field it needs to match higher up. However, the second line in the snippet below returns no results.
// Request only the page that has been viewed
{ '$unwind' : '$DSpub.PublicationPages'},
{ '$match' : {'pageId' : '$DSpub.PublicationPages.PublicationPageId' } }
Is there a more appropriate way to do this? Or can I avoid doing this altogether by unwinding the "from" collection before performing the '$lookup', and then match both fields?

Answer 1

This is not as easy at it looks.
$match does not operate on dynamic data (that means we are comparing static value against data set). To overcome that - we can use $project phase to add a bool static flag, that can be utilized by $match
Please see example below:
Having input collection like this:
[{
"_id" : ObjectId("56be1b51a0f4c8591f37f62b"),
"name" : "Alice",
"sub_users" : [{
"_id" : ObjectId("56be1b51a0f4c8591f37f62a")
}
]
}, {
"_id" : ObjectId("56be1b51a0f4c8591f37f62a"),
"name" : "Bob",
"sub_users" : [{
"_id" : ObjectId("56be1b51a0f4c8591f37f62a")
}
]
}
]
We want to get only fields where _id and $docs.sub_users._id" are same, where docs are $lookup output.
db.collecction.aggregate([{
$lookup : {
from : "collecction",
localField : "_id",
foreignField : "_id",
as : "docs"
}
}, {
$unwind : "$docs"
}, {
$unwind : "$docs.sub_users"
}, {
$project : {
_id : 0,
fields : "$$ROOT",
matched : {
$eq : ["$_id", "$docs.sub_users._id"]
}
}
}, {
$match : {
matched : true
}
}
])
that gives output:
{
"fields" : {
"_id" : ObjectId("56be1b51a0f4c8591f37f62a"),
"name" : "Bob",
"sub_users" : [
{
"_id" : ObjectId("56be1b51a0f4c8591f37f62a")
}
],
"docs" : {
"_id" : ObjectId("56be1b51a0f4c8591f37f62a"),
"name" : "Bob",
"sub_users" : {
"_id" : ObjectId("56be1b51a0f4c8591f37f62a")
}
}
},
"matched" : true
}