Run a MongoDB Search Query

Overview

In this guide, you can learn how to use the C driver to run MongoDB Search queries on a collection. MongoDB Search enables you to perform full-text searches on collections hosted on MongoDB Atlas. MongoDB Search indexes specify the behavior of the search and which fields to index.

Sample Data

The example in this guide uses the movies collection in the sample_mflix database from the Atlas sample datasets. To learn how to create a free MongoDB Atlas cluster and load the sample datasets, see the Get Started guide.

Run a MongoDB Search Query

This section shows how to create an aggregation pipeline to run a MongoDB Search query on a collection. In your bson_t structure that represents your pipeline stages, add the $search stage to specify the search criteria. Then, call the mongoc_collection_aggregate() function and pass your pipeline as a parameter.

Tip

To learn more about aggregation operations, see the Aggregation guide.

Before running a MongoDB Search query, you must create a MongoDB Search index on your collection. To learn how to programmatically create a MongoDB Search index, see the Create a Search Index section of the MongoDB Search Indexes guide.

MongoDB Search Example

This example runs a MongoDB Search query by performing the following actions:

Creates a $search stage that instructs the driver to query for documents in which the title field contains the word "Alabama"
Creates a $project stage that instructs the driver to include the title field in the query results
Passes the pipeline stages to the mongoc_collection_aggregate() function and prints the results

const bson_t *doc;
bson_t *pipeline = BCON_NEW("pipeline",
    "[",
    "{", "$search", "{", "index", BCON_UTF8("<index name>"), "text", "{", "query", BCON_UTF8("Alabama"), "path", BCON_UTF8("title"), "}", "}", "}",
    "{", "$project", "{", "title", BCON_INT32(1), "}", "}",
    "]");
mongoc_cursor_t *results =
    mongoc_collection_aggregate(collection, MONGOC_QUERY_NONE, pipeline, NULL, NULL);
while (mongoc_cursor_next(results, &doc)) {
    char *str = bson_as_canonical_extended_json(doc, NULL);
    printf("%s\n", str);
    bson_free(str);
}
bson_destroy(pipeline);
mongoc_cursor_destroy(results);

{ "_id" : { "$oid" : "..." }, "title" : "Alabama Moon" }
{ "_id" : { "$oid" : "..." }, "title" : "Sweet Home Alabama" }
{ "_id" : { "$oid" : "..." }, "title" : "Crazy in Alabama" }

Additional Information

To learn more about MongoDB Search, see MongoDB Search in the Atlas documentation.

API Documentation

To learn more about the mongoc_collection_aggregate() function, see the API documentation.

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