Mongodb: sort documents by array objects

Question

I would like to return the documents in an order sorted by which holds the lowest foo.bar value (which are array objects).

I can do db.collection

Answer 1

It seems mongo can do this.

For example, if I have the following documents:

{ a:{ b:[ {c:1}, {c:5 } ] } }
{ a:{ b:[ {c:0}, {c:12} ] } }
{ a:{ b:[ {c:4}, {c:3 } ] } }
{ a:{ b:[ {c:1}, {c:9 } ] } }

And run the following:

db.collection.find({}).sort({ "a.b.c":1 });
// produces:
{ a:{ b:[ {c:0}, {c:12} ] } }
{ a:{ b:[ {c:1}, {c:5 } ] } }
{ a:{ b:[ {c:1}, {c:9 } ] } }
{ a:{ b:[ {c:4}, {c:3 } ] } }

db.collection.find({}).sort({ "a.b.c":-1 });
// produces:
{ a:{ b:[ {c:0}, {c:12} ] } }
{ a:{ b:[ {c:1}, {c:9 } ] } }
{ a:{ b:[ {c:1}, {c:5 } ] } }
{ a:{ b:[ {c:4}, {c:3 } ] } }

As you can see, the sort by {"a.b.c":1} takes the min of all values in the array and sorts on that, whereas the sort by {"a.b.c":-1} takes the max of all the values.