Services or capabilities described in AWS documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud Region, see the AWS European Sovereign Cloud User Guide.

$addToSet

The $addToSet aggregation operator returns an array of unique values from a specified expression for each group. It is used within the $group stage to accumulate distinct values, automatically eliminating duplicates.

Parameters

Example (MongoDB Shell)

The following example demonstrates using the $addToSet operator to collect unique cities where orders were placed for each customer.

Create sample documents

db.orders.insertMany([
  { _id: 1, customer: "Alice", city: "Seattle", amount: 100 },
  { _id: 2, customer: "Alice", city: "Portland", amount: 150 },
  { _id: 3, customer: "Bob", city: "Seattle", amount: 200 },
  { _id: 4, customer: "Alice", city: "Seattle", amount: 75 },
  { _id: 5, customer: "Bob", city: "Boston", amount: 300 }
]);

Query example

db.orders.aggregate([
  {
    $group: {
      _id: "$customer",
      cities: { $addToSet: "$city" }
    }
  }
]);

Output

[
  { _id: 'Bob', cities: [ 'Seattle', 'Boston' ] },
  { _id: 'Alice', cities: [ 'Seattle', 'Portland' ] }
]

Code examples

To view a code example for using the $addToSet aggregation operator, choose the tab for the language that you want to use:

Node.js

const { MongoClient } = require('mongodb');

async function example() {
  const client = await MongoClient.connect('mongodb://<username>:<password>@<cluster-endpoint>:27017/?tls=true&tlsCAFile=global-bundle.pem&replicaSet=rs0&readPreference=secondaryPreferred&retryWrites=false');
  const db = client.db('test');
  const collection = db.collection('orders');

  const result = await collection.aggregate([
    {
      $group: {
        _id: "$customer",
        cities: { $addToSet: "$city" }
      }
    }
  ]).toArray();

  console.log(result);
  await client.close();
}

example();

Python

from pymongo import MongoClient

def example():
    client = MongoClient('mongodb://<username>:<password>@<cluster-endpoint>:27017/?tls=true&tlsCAFile=global-bundle.pem&replicaSet=rs0&readPreference=secondaryPreferred&retryWrites=false')
    db = client['test']
    collection = db['orders']

    result = list(collection.aggregate([
        {
            '$group': {
                '_id': '$customer',
                'cities': { '$addToSet': '$city' }
            }
        }
    ]))

    print(result)
    client.close()

example()