搜索MongoDB中的所有集合数组

Question

I have a nested array of values that look like this in RoboMongo;

Or this might be slightly clearer;

Is there a way of being able to (in one query) search through all the key/value pairs with a regex? The script will not know how many customField key/value pairs there are!

So far I have in PHP;

['poco.customFields.0.value' => ['$regex' => '.*'.$query.'.*', '$options' => 'i']],

Which is working on the first key/value pair nicely.. But not the others and I don't know how to do that without either doing two queries or just guessing that there will be no more than, say, 100 and just looping through it.

Answer 1

Assuming you want to acquire documents with contents of customFields matching specific regex expression, there are two interpretations I can think of.

(1) Return all documents with at least one value in customFields matching the pattern:

[ 'customFields.value' => [ '$regex' => $pattern, '$options' => 'i' ]]

(2) Return all document with all values in customFields matching the pattern:

[ 'customFields.value' => [ '$not' => new MongoDB\BSON\Regex('\b^(?!'.$pattern.').+', 'i') ]]

The first query is self-explanatory: iterate through all elements of customFields array and perform a regex check on each. If at least one of the elements matches the pattern, the parent document is returned.

The second one is a bit more sophisticated. Requirement "where all elements match particular pattern" is equivalent to "where no single element does not match particular pattern". In order to achieve double negation, we use $not along with inverse regex expression created by applying negative lookahead to the same query we have used before. Since $not refuses to accept strings, we generate immediate regex expression by using an instance of MongoDB\BSON\Regex class.

More information on negative lookahead may be found here.