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cursor.returnKey()

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Definition

cursor.returnKey()

Important

mongosh Method

This page documents a mongosh method. This is not the documentation for a language-specific driver, such as Node.js.

For MongoDB API drivers, refer to the language-specific MongoDB driver documentation.

Tip

Starting in MongoDB 4.4, $meta supports the keyword "indexKey" to return index key metadata if an index is used. The use of { $meta: "indexKey" } is preferred over cursor.returnKey().

Modifies the cursor to return index keys rather than the documents.

The cursor.returnKey() has the following form:

cursor.returnKey()
Returns:The cursor that returnKey() is attached to with a modified result set. This allows for additional cursor modifiers to be chained.

Behavior

If the query does not use an index to perform the read operation, the cursor returns empty documents.

Example

The restaurants collection contains documents with the following schema:

{
   "_id" : ObjectId("564f3a35b385149fc7e3fab9"),
   "address" : {
      "building" : "2780",
      "coord" : [
         -73.98241999999999,
         40.579505
      ],
      "street" : "Stillwell Avenue",
      "zipcode" : "11224"
   },
   "borough" : "Brooklyn",
   "cuisine" : "American ",
   "grades" : [
      {
         "date" : ISODate("2014-06-10T00:00:00Z"),
         "grade" : "A",
         "score" : 5
      },
      {
         "date" : ISODate("2013-06-05T00:00:00Z"),
         "grade" : "A",
         "score" : 7
      }
   ],
   "name" : "Riviera Caterer",
   "restaurant_id" : "40356018"
}

The collection has two indexes in addition to the default _id index:

{
   "v" : 1,
   "key" : {
      "_id" : 1
   },
   "name" : "_id_",
   "ns" : "guidebook.restaurant"
},
{
   "v" : 1,
   "key" : {
      "cuisine" : 1
   },
   "name" : "cuisine_1",
   "ns" : "guidebook.restaurant"
},
{
   "v" : 1,
   "key" : {
      "_fts" : "text",
      "_ftsx" : 1
   },
   "name" : "name_text",
   "ns" : "guidebook.restaurant",
   "weights" : {
      "name" : 1
   },
   "default_language" : "english",
   "language_override" : "language",
   "textIndexVersion" : 3
}

The following code uses the cursor.returnKey() method to return only the indexed fields used for executing the query:

var csr = db.restaurant.find( { "cuisine" : "Japanese" } )
csr.returnKey()

This returns the following:

{ "cuisine" : "Japanese" }
{ "cuisine" : "Japanese" }
{ "cuisine" : "Japanese" }
{ "cuisine" : "Japanese" }
...