MongoDB - Manual Referencing Without Application - mongodb

Question

I understand Manual referencing being, one document containing the reference to another.
As in the MongoDB's documentation:
original_id = ObjectId()
db.places.insert({
"_id": original_id,
"name": "Broadway Center",
"url": "bc.example.net"
})
db.people.insert({
"name": "Erin",
"places_id": original_id,
"url": "bc.example.net/Erin"
})
I am able to use a find on the places to get a certain name.
db.places.find({name : "Broadway Center"});
This will give the id. And then my application can use this ID to query the people to see who live here?
But, If i dont have a application. How would I go about doing this solely in a mongo shell? I was thinking about using find, and then iterating over the cursor using a forEach? But this seems a bit hacky.
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You don't need to loop through using the cursor from find(), just use findOne() because a single document is returned with this method and you have access to the document directly (no need to apply cursor methods to the result). In mongo shell you can do this:
var result = db.places.findOne({name : "Broadway Center"});
if (result) {
var place_id = result._id;
var peopleArray = db.people.find({ "places_id": place_id }).toArray();
if (peopleArray.length > 0) { printjson (peopleArray[0]); }
}