MongodB $exists always return false?

help
1

This is my collections in MongodB named Sparks:

(index) _id              ticketnumber     userid     username 
0      "AzpJ8bDBNRWruSqKp"  "CHG_1234"    CHG123     scheung
1      "h3Kj8bBrjFfbQJGA"   "CHG_2345"    CHG123     scheung

Sparks.find( { "ticketnumber.CHG_1234":{ $exists: true } } )

Why is it always returning false even when there is such field? According to docs is:
https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/operator/query/exists/

2

$exists checks if a field is present or not, e.g. if you want to query for all Widgets that have a color field (with any value at all, even null or empty string), then you could do: Widgets.find({color: {$exists: true}}). This doesn’t seem to fit with what you are trying to do in your example…

3

I’m not sure but if ticketnumber is your field, you’d check for ticketnumber… not for the value of ticketnumber.

Like the documentation says:

$exists matches the documents that contain the field

If you want to find a specific value for your field, you’d search for it more like this:

Sparks.find( { ticketnumber: "CHG_1234" } )

4

But this Stackoverflow says:

“When you’re not matching a complete object you need to use dot notation to use an operator against an embedded object.”:

cursor = fols.find({‘followers.123’:{’$exists’: True}})

and that’s I am using, dot notation, but still returning false?

Sparks = new Mongo.Collection(‘sparks’);
var Schemas = {};

Schemas.Spark = new SimpleSchema({
ticketnumber: {
type: String,
label: “TICKET_NUMBER”,
max: 10,
index: true,
unique: true
},
userid: {
type: String,
label: “USER_ID”,
max: 10,
},
username: {
type: String,
label: “ASSIGNED_TO”,
max: 50,
}),
Sparks.attachSchema(Schemas.Spark);

5

"CHG_1234" is a value of the ticketnumber field, not a field itself. Your query is returning nothing because there are no documents that have a "ticketnumber.CHG_1234" field.

There are documents that have a value of "CHG_1234" in the ticketnumber field. To find them, you would do something like:

Sparks.find({
  "ticketnumber": "CHG_1234"
});

You’re not dealing with subdocuments here, so don’t worry about dot notation.

6

Thanks Pete and @Batjko, but whether it exists or not the returned object seems to be identical, so how to differentiate between one that exists vs non-existent object? Though doing a .count() on the returned object provides 1 vs 0. But this is not using the $exists keyword as Pete mentioned? So why use $exists if this can be performance just by defining the key and matching value pair?

7

You would use $exists if you wanted to know if some document had any value for the field you’re querying on.

A query like this:

Sparks.find({
  ticketnumber: { $exists: true }
});

Will return all of the documents in your first post, because all of them have values for ticketnumber. If you had some other spark document that didn’t have a value in ticketnumber (undefined), it wouldn’t be returned by the $exists: true query, but it would be returned by an $exists: false query.

I hope that helps. $exists just isn’t the right tool for the job here.

1 Like
8

Thanks Pete this clears it up.

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