$lookup - Amazon DocumentDB
Example (MongoDB Shell)Code examples
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$lookup

The $lookup aggregation stage in Amazon DocumentDB allows you to perform a left outer join between two collections. This operation lets you combine data from multiple collections based on matching field values. It is particularly useful when you need to incorporate data from related collections into your query results.

Parameters

  • from: The name of the collection to perform the join with.

  • localField: The field from the input documents to match against the foreignField.

  • foreignField: The field from the documents in the from collection to match against the localField.

  • as: The name of the new field to add to the output documents containing the matching documents from the from collection.

Example (MongoDB Shell)

The following example demonstrates a simple $lookup operation that joins data from the orders collection into the customers collection.

Create sample documents

db.customers.insertMany([
  { _id: 1, name: "Alice" },
  { _id: 2, name: "Bob" },
  { _id: 3, name: "Charlie" }
]);

db.orders.insertMany([
  { _id: 1, customer_id: 1, total: 50 },
  { _id: 2, customer_id: 1, total: 100 },
  { _id: 3, customer_id: 2, total: 75 }
]);

Query example

db.customers.aggregate([
  {
    $lookup: {
      from: "orders",           
      localField: "_id",        
      foreignField: "customer_id", 
      as: "orders" 
    }
  }
]);

Output

[
  {
    _id: 1,
    name: 'Alice',
    orders: [
      { _id: 2, customer_id: 1, total: 100 },
      { _id: 1, customer_id: 1, total: 50 }
    ]
  },
  { _id: 3, name: 'Charlie', orders: [] },
  {
    _id: 2,
    name: 'Bob',
    orders: [ { _id: 3, customer_id: 2, total: 75 } ]
  }
]

Code examples

To view a code example for using the $lookup command, 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');

  await client.connect();

  const db = client.db('test');

  const result = await db.collection('customers').aggregate([
    {
      $lookup: {
        from: 'orders',
        localField: '_id',
        foreignField: 'customer_id',
        as: 'orders'
      }
    }
  ]).toArray();

  console.log(JSON.stringify(result, null, 2));
  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.customers

    pipeline = [
        {
            "$lookup": {
                "from": "orders",
                "localField": "_id",
                "foreignField": "customer_id",
                "as": "orders"
            }
        }
    ]

    result = collection.aggregate(pipeline)

    for doc in result:
        print(doc)

    client.close()

example()