Use the limit method to retrieve a specific number of documents from MongoDB

For a full overview of MongoDB and all my posts on it, check out my overview.

While you can use the find method to read data back out of MongoDB and the findOne method is a MongoDB query to pull specifically one result, you can use the limit method after using find to retrieve a specific number of documents.

Given this dataset in a collection called users:

{
    "name": "John Doe",
    "email": "test@test.com",
    "admin": false
},
{
    "name": "Jane Doe",
    "email": "test2@test2.com",
    "admin": false
},
{
    "name": "Bob Doe",
    "email": "bob@bob.com",
    "admin": true
},
{
    "name": "Your Mom",
    "email": "koolkid@someplace.com",
    "admin": false
}

If you want to get only the first two documents from the users collection, you can chain the limit method after using find like so:

db.users.find().limit(2)

Will return the following:

{
    "name": "John Doe",
    "email": "test@test.com",
    "admin": false
},
{
    "name": "Jane Doe",
    "email": "test2@test2.com",
    "admin": false
}

The argument passed into limit determines the maximum number of documents the cursor from find will return.

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Use the limit method to retrieve a specific number of documents from MongoDB

Donald Feury

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