Meteor: how to search for only distinct field values aka a collection.distinct("fieldname") similar to Mongo's

Solution 1:

You can just use underscore.js, which comes with Meteor - should be fine for the suggested use case. You might run into performance problems if you try this on a vast data set or run it repeatedly, but it should be adequate for common-or-garden usage:

var distinctEntries = _.uniq(Collection.find({}, {
    sort: {myField: 1}, fields: {myField: true}
}).fetch().map(function(x) {
    return x.myField;
}), true);

That will return the distinct entries in myField for all documents in Collection. Apologies if the one-liner looks a bit unwieldy; the sort and fields options and the true flag are just to make it more efficient.

Solution 2:

If you'd prefer to do this on the server and thus save client memory and bandwidth try this aggregator package. It wraps mongodb's "distinct" function. https://github.com/zvictor/meteor-mongo-server/

Solution 3:

A Non-Underscore, pure mongo solution would be to access the raw collection directly. This involves a Promise (though you can use await to await the resolved value).

Note: it will run on the MongoDB server and return distinct values to the client.

Collection._collection.rawCollection().distinct('fieldname').then(distinctValues => console.log(distinctValues))