$last (aggregation)¶

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Definition¶

$last¶

Returns the value that results from applying an expression to the last document in a group of documents that share the same group by a field. Only meaningful when documents are in a defined order.

$last is only available in the $group stage.

$last has the following syntax:

{ $last: <expression> }

For more information on expressions, see Expressions.

Behavior¶

When using $last in a $group stage, the $group stage should follow a $sort stage to have the input documents in a defined order.

Note

Although the $sort stage passes ordered documents as input to the $group stage, $group is not guaranteed to maintain this sort order in its own output.

Example¶

Consider a sales collection with the following documents:

{ "_id" : 1, "item" : "abc", "date" : ISODate("2014-01-01T08:00:00Z"), "price" : 10, "quantity" : 2 }
{ "_id" : 2, "item" : "jkl", "date" : ISODate("2014-02-03T09:00:00Z"), "price" : 20, "quantity" : 1 }
{ "_id" : 3, "item" : "xyz", "date" : ISODate("2014-02-03T09:05:00Z"), "price" : 5, "quantity" : 5 }
{ "_id" : 4, "item" : "abc", "date" : ISODate("2014-02-15T08:00:00Z"), "price" : 10, "quantity" : 10 }
{ "_id" : 5, "item" : "xyz", "date" : ISODate("2014-02-15T09:05:00Z"), "price" : 5, "quantity" : 10 }
{ "_id" : 6, "item" : "xyz", "date" : ISODate("2014-02-15T12:05:10Z"), "price" : 5, "quantity" : 5 }
{ "_id" : 7, "item" : "xyz", "date" : ISODate("2014-02-15T14:12:12Z"), "price" : 5, "quantity" : 10 }

The following operation first sorts the documents by item and date, and then in the following $group stage, groups the now sorted documents by the item field and uses the $last accumulator to compute the last sales date for each item:

db.sales.aggregate(
   [
     { $sort: { item: 1, date: 1 } },
     {
       $group:
         {
           _id: "$item",
           lastSalesDate: { $last: "$date" }
         }
     }
   ]
)

The operation returns the following results:

{ "_id" : "xyz", "lastSalesDate" : ISODate("2014-02-15T14:12:12Z") }
{ "_id" : "jkl", "lastSalesDate" : ISODate("2014-02-03T09:00:00Z") }
{ "_id" : "abc", "lastSalesDate" : ISODate("2014-02-15T08:00:00Z") }

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