How to force MongoDB pullAll to disregard document order - mongodb

Question

I have a mongoDB document that has the following structure:
{
user:user_name,
streams:[
{user:user_a, name:name_a},
{user:user_b, name:name_b},
{user:user_c, name:name_c}
]
}
I want to use $pullAll to remove from the streams array, passing it an array of streams (the size of the array varies from 1 to N):
var streamsA = [{user:"user_a", name:"name_a"},{user:"user_b", name:"name_b"}]
var streamsB = [{name:"name_a", user:"user_a"},{name:"name_b", user:"user_b"}]
I use the following mongoDB command to perform the update operation:
db.streams.update({name:"user_name", {"$pullAll:{streams:streamsA}})
db.streams.update({name:"user_name", {"$pullAll:{streams:streamsB}})
Removing streamsA succeeds, whereas removing streamsB fails. After digging through the mongoDB manuals, I saw that the order of fields in streamsA and streamsB records has to match the order of fields in the database. For streamsB the order does not match, that's why it was not removed.
I can reorder the streams to the database document order prior to performing an update operation, but is there an easier and cleaner way to do this? Is there some flag that can be set to update and/or pullAll to ignore the order?
Thank You,
Gary

Answer 1

The $pullAll operator is really a "special case" that was mostly intended for single "scalar" array elements and not for sub-documents in the way you are using it.
Instead use $pull which will inspect each element and use an $or condition for the document lists:
db.streams.update(
{ "user": "user_name" },
{ "$pull": { "streams": { "$or": streamsB } }}
)
That way it does not matter which order the fields are in or indeed look for an "exact match" as the current $pullAll operation is actually doing.