$group (aggregation)

Groups documents together for the purpose of calculating aggregate values based on a collection of documents. Practically, group often supports tasks such as average page views for each page in a website on a daily basis.

The output of $group depends on how you define groups. Begin by specifying an identifier (i.e. a _id field) for the group you’re creating with this pipeline. You can specify a single field from the documents in the pipeline, a previously computed value, or an aggregate key made up from several incoming fields. Aggregate keys may resemble the following document:

{ _id : { author: '$author', pageViews: '$pageViews', posted: '$posted' } }

With the exception of the _id field, $group cannot output nested documents.

Every group expression must specify an _id field. You may specify the _id field as a dotted field path reference, a document with multiple fields enclosed in braces (i.e. { and }), or a constant value.

Consider the following example:

db.article.aggregate(
    { $group : {
        _id : "$author",
        docsPerAuthor : { $sum : 1 },
        viewsPerAuthor : { $sum : "$pageViews" }
    }}
);

This groups by the author field and computes two fields, the first docsPerAuthor is a counter field that adds one for each document with a given author field using the $sum function. The viewsPerAuthor field is the sum of all of the pageViews fields in the documents for each group.

Each field defined for the $group must use one of the group aggregation function listed below to generate its composite value:

• $addToSet
• $first
• $last
• $max
• $min
• $avg
• $push
• $sum