MongoDB like statement with multiple fields - sql

Question

With SQL we can do the following :
select * from x where concat(x.y ," ",x.z) like "%find m%"
when x.y = "find" and x.z = "me".
How do I do the same thing with MongoDB, When I use a JSON structure similar to this:
{
data:
[
{
id:1,
value : "find"
},
{
id:2,
value : "me"
}
]
}

Answer 1

The comparison to SQL here is not valid since no relational database has the same concept of embedded arrays that MongoDB has, and is provided in your example. You can only "concat" between "fields in a row" of a table. Basically not the same thing.
You can do this with the JavaScript evaluation of $where, which is not optimal, but it's a start. And you can add some extra "smarts" to the match as well with caution:
db.collection.find({
"$or": [
{ "data.value": /^f/ },
{ "data.value": /^m/ }
],
"$where": function() {
var items = [];
this.data.forEach(function(item) {
items.push(item.value);
});
var myString = items.join(" ");
if ( myString.match(/find m/) != null )
return 1;
}
})
So there you go. We optimized this a bit by taking the first characters from your "test string" in each word and compared the tokens to each element of the array in the document.
The next part "concatenates" the array elements into a string and then does a "regex" comparison ( same as "like" ) on the concatenated result to see if it matches. Where it does then the document is considered a match and returned.
Not optimal, but these are the options available to MongoDB on a structure like this. Perhaps the structure should be different. But you don't specify why you want this so we can't advise a better solution to what you want to achieve.