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Asked: 2026-06-11T13:30:29+00:00

The MongoDB sorting functions are pretty neato. Can you use them on objects and/or

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The MongoDB sorting functions are pretty neato. Can you use them on objects and/or arrays that have nothing to do with the database itself?

var mongo       = require('mongodb'),
    Server      = mongo.Server,
    Db          = mongo.Db,
    sortingFun  = mongo.internalSortFilterFunction(); // By the miracle of imagination, this is a made-up line.

There is, for example, this awesome little node project called sift: MongoDB inspired array filtering. But there are more similar tools, different opinions, and projects merging and disappearing.

Considering it’s popularity, MongoDB is quite probably gonna hang around. For that reason, plus the added bonus of being exactly similar instead of pretty similar, I was wondering if a specific object/model/function within node-mongodb could be linked from the require('mongodb') specifically for using the sorting and filtering functions on custom objects/arrays.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The sorting is done in the mongo server, not the client. It’s also not particularily fast — big collections should be pre-sorted, but that’s another issue.

    The mongo server is afaik written in C++ and uses custom types, separate from the JS engine, called BSON.

    So if there is no sort implementation on the client for javascript, which would be an absurd feature, you can’t use server sort.

    Edit: If you really really want to use the sort, performance be damned, you could insert js objects into the DB, effectively converting them to BSON in mongo collections. Then sort it and pull it from the DB. Indexes etc will need to be recreated for every call to that function. Mongodb also refuses to sort for big collections sans index (limit being somewhere around 1000 I believe)

    PS. I haven’t read the source. I can’t imagine a JS realtime, indexless sort that matches the speed of MongoDB’s sort esp. when distributed (sharded). But you can write node.js modules in C++, and if BSON is similar enough to V8 JS objects (wouldn’t think so), you might be able to port it. I wouldn’t go down that road because it’s probably not going to be a big speed increase compared to reimplementing it in JS, a reimplementation which would be a lot easier to create and maintain.

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