mongodb - How to sort sub-documents in the array field?

Question

I'm using the MongoDB shell to fetch some results, ordered. Here's a sampler,

{
"_id" : "32022",
"topics" : [
    {
        "weight" : 281.58551703724993,
        "words" : "some words"
    },
    {
        "weight" : 286.6695125796183,
        "words" : "some more words"
    },
    {
        "weight" : 289.8354232846977,
        "words" : "wowz even more wordz"
    },
    {
        "weight" : 305.70093587160807,
        "words" : "WORDZ"
    }]
}

what I want to get is, same structure, but ordered by "topics" : []

{
"_id" : "32022",
"topics" : [
    {
        "weight" : 305.70093587160807,
        "words" : "WORDZ"
    },
    {
        "weight" : 289.8354232846977,
        "words" : "wowz even more wordz"
    },
    {
        "weight" : 286.6695125796183,
        "words" : "some more words"
    },
    {
        "weight" : 281.58551703724993,
        "words" : "some words"
    },
    ]
}

I managed to get some ordered results, but no luck in grouping them by id field. is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

MongoDB doesn't provide a way to do this out of the box but there is a workaround which is to update your documents and use the $sort update operator to sort your array.

db.collection.update_many({}, {"$push": {"topics": {"$each": [], "$sort": {"weight": -1}}}})

You can still use the .aggregate() method like this:

db.collection.aggregate([
    {"$unwind": "$topics"}, 
    {"$sort": {"_id": 1, "topics.weight": -1}}, 
    {"$group": {"_id": "$_id", "topics": {"$push": "$topics"}}}
])

But this is less efficient if all you want is sort your array, and you definitely shouldn't do that.

---

You could always do this client side using the .sort or sorted function.