MongoDB distinct aggregation

Question

I'm working on a query to find cities with most zips for each state:

db.zips.distinct("state", db.zips.aggregate([ 
    { $group:
      { _id: {
           state: "$state", 
           city: "$city" 
         },
        numberOfzipcodes: { 
           $sum: 1
         }
      }
    }, 
    { $sort: {
        numberOfzipcodes: -1
         }
      }
  ])
)

The aggregate part of the query seems to work fine, but when I add the distinct I get an empty result.

Is this because I have state in the id? Can I do something like distinct("_id.state ?

Answer 1

Distinct and the aggregation framework are not inter-operable.

Instead you just want:

db.zips.aggregate([ 
    {$group:{_id:{city:'$city', state:'$state'}, numberOfzipcodes:{$sum:1}}}, 
    {$sort:{numberOfzipcodes:-1}},
    {$group:{_id:'$_id.state', city:{$first:'$_id.city'}, 
              numberOfzipcode:{$first:'$numberOfzipcodes'}}}
]);