Pretty print of MQL/JSON code

[Stennie_X (Stennie)]

Hi @Takis,

Can you share an example of the sort of formatting you are looking for (sample document before & after)? Folks have different preferences for formatting of MQL and JSON queries.

I second @steevej’s suggestion of jq for pretty-printing JSON (and it is great for quick filtering and wrangling, too). For quick formatting I use pretty-printing in the mongo shell, or work in a more visual tool like MongoDB Compass.

I build more complicated aggregation queries using variables for readability and more straightforward debugging. @steevej shared a great example of this in a recent discussion:

@steevej

One thing I do to make it more readable is to assign each stage a variable and have the pipeline be an array of my variables. For example:

match = { "$match" : { ... } } ;
sort = { "$sort" : { ... } } ;
lookup = { "$lookup" : { ... } } ;
group = { "$group" : { ... } } ;
pipeline = [ match , lookup , sort , group ] ;
db.collection.aggregate( pipeline ) ;

Regards,
Stennie