Question

I have have a collection called users. Each user document has an embedded document called phone numbers.

}
   "_id": ObjectId("4f2984b1af06e80418000000"),
   "User_FirstName": "Frank",
   "User_LastName": "Williams",
   "User_PhoneNumbers": [
                  {"Phone_Type": "Home","Phone_Number: "555-555-5555" },
                  {"Phone_Type": "Mobile","Phone_Number: "333-333-3333" }
                  ]
}

I am trying to display all the phone numbers for the user named “Frank Williams”. I would like to use a loop that returns the results (all phone numbers for a particular user):

Home, 555-555-5555
Mobile, 333-333-33333

I am new to mongodb and don’t know how to query an embedded document and have it return all the embedded documents for that particular user. I am coding in php. Thank you for any help.

Answer 1

At best you can return only the whole User_PhoneNumbers array. You cannot pick individual items out of it. (I am talking about regular queries, of course. With map-reduce or upcoming Aggregation Framework you’ll be able to do this).

db.collection.find({"_id": ObjectId("4f2984b1af06e80418000000")}, 
                   {"User_PhoneNumbers": 1, _id: -1});

This query will return this document:

{
   "User_PhoneNumbers": [
              {"Phone_Type": "Home","Phone_Number": "555-555-5555" },
              {"Phone_Type": "Mobile","Phone_Number": "333-333-3333" }
            ]
}

Then in PHP you can handle it however you want.