Limit the Number of Entries Scanned¶

This tutorial describes how to limit the text search to scan only those documents with a field value.

The text command includes the filter option to further restrict the results of a text search. For a filter that specifies equality conditions, this tutorial demonstrates how to perform text searches on only those documents that match the filter conditions, as opposed to performing a text search first on all the documents and then matching on the filter condition.

Consider a collection inventory that contains the following documents:

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{ _id: 1, dept: "tech", description: "a fun green computer" }
{ _id: 2, dept: "tech", description: "a wireless red mouse" }
{ _id: 3, dept: "kitchen", description: "a green placemat" }
{ _id: 4, dept: "kitchen", description: "a red peeler" }
{ _id: 5, dept: "food", description: "a green apple" }
{ _id: 6, dept: "food", description: "a red potato" }

A common use case is to perform text searches by individual departments, such as:

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db.inventory.runCommand( "text", {
                                   search: "green",
                                   filter: { dept : "kitchen" }
                                 }
                       )

To limit the text search to scan only those documents within a specific dept, create a compound index that specifies an ascending/descending index key on the field dept and a text index key on the field description:

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db.inventory.ensureIndex(
                          {
                            dept: 1,
                            description: "text"
                          }
                        )

Important

The ascending/descending index keys must be listed before, or prefix, the text index keys.
By prefixing the text index fields with ascending/descending index fields, MongoDB will only index documents that have the prefix fields.
You cannot include multi-key index fields or geospatial index fields.
The text command must include the filter option that specifies an equality condition for the prefix fields.

Then, the text search within a particular department will limit the scan of indexed documents. For example, the following text command scans only those documents with dept equal to kitchen:

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db.inventory.runCommand( "text", {
                                   search: "green",
                                   filter: { dept : "kitchen" }
                                 }
                       )

The returned result includes the statistics that shows that the command scanned 1 document, as indicated by the nscanned field:

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{

  "queryDebugString" : "green||||||",
  "language" : "english",
  "results" : [
                {
                  "score" : 0.75,
                  "obj" : {
                            "_id" : 3,
                            "dept" : "kitchen",
                            "description" : "a green placemat"
                          }
                }
              ],
  "stats" : {
              "nscanned" : 1,
              "nscannedObjects" : 0,
              "n" : 1,
              "nfound" : 1,
              "timeMicros" : 211
            },
  "ok" : 1
}

For more information on the result set, see Output.

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