How to Avoid Duplicate Entries in MongoDb Meteor App - mongodb

Question

How to avoid duplicate entries in mongoDb in Meteor application.
On the command: db.products.find({},{"TEMPLATE_NAME": 1},{unique : true})
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5555d0a16ce3b01bb759a771"), "TEMPLATE_NAME" : "B" }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5555d0b46ce3b01bb759a772"), "TEMPLATE_NAME" : "A" }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5555d0c86ce3b01bb759a773"), "TEMPLATE_NAME" : "C" }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5555d0f86ce3b01bb759a774"), "TEMPLATE_NAME" : "C" }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5555d1026ce3b01bb759a775"), "TEMPLATE_NAME" : "A" }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5555d1086ce3b01bb759a776"), "TEMPLATE_NAME" : "B" }
I want to retrieve only the unique template names and show them on HTML page.

Answer 1

Use the aggregation framework where your pipeline stages consist of the $group and $project operators respectively. The $group operator step groups the input documents by the given key and thus will return distinct documents in the result. The $project operator then reshapes each document in the stream, such as by adding new fields or removing existing fields:
db.products.aggregate([
{
"$group": {
"_id": "$TEMPLATE_NAME"
}
},
{
"$project": {
"_id": 0,
"TEMPLATE_NAME": "$_id"
}
}
])
Result:
/* 0 */
{
"result" : [
{
"TEMPLATE_NAME" : "C"
},
{
"TEMPLATE_NAME" : "A"
},
{
"TEMPLATE_NAME" : "B"
}
],
"ok" : 1
}
You could then use the meteorhacks:aggregate package to implement the aggregation in Meteor:
Add to your app with
meteor add meteorhacks:aggregate
Then simply use .aggregate function like below.
var products = new Mongo.Collection('products');
var pipeline = [
{
"$group": {
"_id": "$TEMPLATE_NAME"
}
},
{
"$project": {
"_id": 0,
"TEMPLATE_NAME": "$_id"
}
}
];
var result = products.aggregate(pipeline);
-- UPDATE --
An alternative that doesn't use aggregation is using underscore's methods to return distinct field values from the collection's find method as follows:
var distinctTemplateNames = _.uniq(Collection.find({}, {
sort: {"TEMPLATE_NAME": 1}, fields: {"TEMPLATE_NAME": true}
}).fetch().map(function(x) {
return x.TEMPLATE_NAME;
}), true)
;
This will return an array with distinct product template names ["A", "B", "C"]
You can check out some tutorials which explain the above approach in detail: Get unique values from a collection in Meteor and METEOR – DISTINCT MONGODB QUERY.

Answer 2

You can use distinct of mongodb like :
db.collectionName.distinct("TEMPLATE_NAME")
This query will return you array of distinct TEMPLATE_NAME