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Read Operations

Skip Returned Results

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  • Overview
  • Sample Documents
  • Example

Overview

Use skip to omit documents from the beginning of the list of returned documents for a read operation. You can combine skip with sort to omit the top (for descending order) or bottom (for ascending order) results for a given query. Since the order of documents returned is not guaranteed in the absence of a sort, using skip without using sort omits arbitrary documents.

If the value of skip exceeds the number of matched documents for a query, that query returns no documents.

Sample Documents

To follow along with the examples in this guide, use the following code snippet to insert documents that describe fruits into the myDB.fruits collection:

const myDB = client.db("myDB");
const myColl = myDB.collection("fruits");
await myColl.insertMany([
  { "_id": 1, "name": "apples", "qty": 5, "rating": 3 },
  { "_id": 2, "name": "bananas", "qty": 7, "rating": 1 },
  { "_id": 3, "name": "oranges", "qty": 6, "rating": 2 },
  { "_id": 4, "name": "avocados", "qty": 3, "rating": 5 },
]);

Note

Your query operation may return a reference to a cursor that contains matching documents. To learn how to examine data stored in the cursor, see the Cursor Fundamentals page.

Example

In the following example, we query the collection with a filter that matches all the documents and pass options that specifies sort and skip commands as query options. The sort option specifies that fruit documents with higher ratings should be returned before ones with lower ratings. The skip option specifies that the first 2 documents should be omitted from the result:

// define an empty query document
const query = {};
const options = {
   // sort in descending (-1) order by rating
   sort : { rating: -1 },
   // omit the first two documents
   skip : 2,
}
const cursor = myColl.find(query, options);
for await (const doc of cursor) {
  console.dir(doc);
}

Since we specified that the first 2 documents should be skipped, the third and fourth highest rating documents are printed by the code snippet above:

{ "_id": 3, "name": "oranges", "qty": 6, "rating": 2 }
{ "_id": 2, "name": "bananas", "qty": 7, "rating": 1 }

The sort and skip options can also be specified as methods chained to the find method. The following two commands are equivalent:

myColl.find(query, { sort: { rating: -1}, skip: 2});
myColl.find(query).sort({rating: -1}).skip(2);

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