Let's assume I have a collection with documents with a ratio attribute that is a floating point number.
{'ratio':1.437}
How do I write a query to find the single document with the closest value to a given integer without loading them all into memory using a driver and finding one with the smallest value of abs(x-ratio)
?
Interesting problem. I don't know if you can do it in a single query, but you can do it in two:
var x = 1; // given integer
closestBelow = db.test.find({ratio: {$lte: x}}).sort({ratio: -1}).limit(1);
closestAbove = db.test.find({ratio: {$gt: x}}).sort({ratio: 1}).limit(1);
Then you just check which of the two docs has the ratio
closest to the target integer.
MongoDB 3.2 Update
The 3.2 release adds support for the $abs
absolute value aggregation operator which now allows this to be done in a single aggregate
query:
var x = 1;
db.test.aggregate([
// Project a diff field that's the absolute difference along with the original doc.
{$project: {diff: {$abs: {$subtract: [x, '$ratio']}}, doc: '$$ROOT'}},
// Order the docs by diff
{$sort: {diff: 1}},
// Take the first one
{$limit: 1}
])