MongoDB’s pipeline aggregation is – like most things in application development these days – confusing as hell (let’s be honest). Writing database queries using JavaScript’s object literal syntax is frightening, and quite frankly ridiculous.
But here we are using it anyway, so we might as well know how to do one of the most useful database operations out there: a query across a collection that returns us a COUNT of the total results and a PORTION of the total results.
Discovering how to do this in Mongo was crucial for us so that we could get ag-grid‘s virtual pagination to play nice! Now we can share the wisdom to the world in this blog post so that 1) others don’t pull their hair out figuring this out and 2) we don’t forget it.
So here’s a quick run down of how you can lookup (populate in mongoose vernacular), match (aka filter), sort, count, and limit using Mongo’s aggregation pipeline. And…. breathe.
Heads up: function calls in this example are to mongoose.
