How do you do a contains query using the MongoDB node.js driver?

Question

How do you do a contains query using the MongoDB node.js driver?

I'm trying to do a search on items that contain a certain substring, but I'm getting no results back (even though I know the data is right for the query, including case):

collection.find({name: "/.*" + keyword + ".*/"}).toArray(function(err, items)

Should that not match everything that contains the keyword? It just returns an empty object.

I'm just using the regular MongoDB driver in an ExpressJS app.

node.js
mongodb

Answer 1

You need to build a regular expression first should try something like this:

var regex = RegExp("/.*" + keyword + ".*/")

Then pass in the variable to the query. I generally find it easier to do the query as a variable and pass that in:

var query = { FieldToSearch: new RegExp('^' + keyword) };
collection.find(query).toArray(...)

I've included the regex as a left rooted regex to take advantage of indexes (always recommended if possible for performance). For more take a look here:

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Advanced+Queries#AdvancedQueries-RegularExpressions