Best way to perform a full text search in MongoDB and Mongoose

Question

I'm searching on Google since days and I tried many things but I still can not perform a good full text search on my user collection.

I tried ElasticSearch but was pretty impossible to query and paginate...

I tried many plugins for Mongoose like ElMongo, mongoose-full-text, Mongoosastic, etc... everyone are really bad documented and I don't know how to perform a good full text search.

So, my collection is a normal collection:

user = {
  name: String,
  email: String,
  profile: {
    something: String,
    somethingElse: String
  }
}

I have a search input in a page with a simple POST, if I type hello world what I need is to search on the entire collection fields the matching words of my search query and get the results.

It will be really nice also to have options to handle a pagination like 10 items per page or something...

What is the best solution to achieve this? I'm using MongoDB 2.6.* with Mongoose, NodeJS and ExpressJS.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can add a text index to your Mongoose schema definition that lets you use the $text operator in your find queries to search all fields included in the text index.

To create an index to support text search on, say, name and profile.something:

var schema = new Schema({
  name: String,
  email: String,
  profile: {
    something: String,
    somethingElse: String
  }
});
schema.index({name: 'text', 'profile.something': 'text'});

Or if you want to include all string fields in the index, use the '$**' wildcard:

schema.index({'$**': 'text'});

This would enable you to perform a paged text search query like:

MyModel.find({$text: {$search: searchString}})
       .skip(20)
       .limit(10)
       .exec(function(err, docs) { ... });

For more details, read the full MongoDB Text Indexes documentation.