sorting documents in mongodb - mongodb

Question

Let's say I have four documents in my collection:
{u'a': {u'time': 3}}
{u'a': {u'time': 5}}
{u'b': {u'time': 4}}
{u'b': {u'time': 2}}
Is it possible to sort them by the field 'time' which is common in both 'a' and 'b' documents?
Thank you

Answer 1

No, you should put your data into a common format so you can sort it on a common field. It can still be nested if you want but it would need to have the same path.

Answer 2

You can use use aggregation and the following code has been tested.
db.test.aggregate({
$project: {
time: {
"$cond": [{
"$gt": ["$a.time", null]
}, "$a.time", "$b.time"]
}
}
}, {
$sort: {
time: -1
}
});
Or if you also want the original fields returned back: gist
Alternatively you can sort once you get the result back, using a customized compare function ( not tested,for illustration purpose only)
db.eval(function() {
return db.mycollection.find().toArray().sort( function(doc1, doc2) {
var time1 = doc1.a? doc1.a.time:doc1.b.time,
time2 = doc2.a?doc2.a.time:doc2.b.time;
return time1 -time2;
})
});

Answer 3

You can, using the aggregation framework.
The trick here is to $project a common field to all the documents so that the $sort stage can use the value in that field to sort the documents.
The $ifNull operator can be used to check if a.time exists, it
does, then the record will be sorted by that value else, by b.time.
code:
db.t.aggregate([
{$project:{"a":1,"b":1,
"sortBy":{$ifNull:["$a.time","$b.time"]}}},
{$sort:{"sortBy":-1}},
{$project:{"a":1,"b":1}}
])
consequences of this approach:
The aggregation pipeline won't be covered by any of the index you
create.
The performance will be very poor for very large data sets.
What you could ideally do is to ask the source system that is sending you the data to standardize its format, something like:
{"a":1,"time":5}
{"b":1,"time":4}
That way your query can make use of the index if you create one on the time field.
db.t.ensureIndex({"time":-1});
code:
db.t.find({}).sort({"time":-1});