Skip Returned Results

Overview

Use skip to omit documents from the beginning of the list of returned documents for a read operation. You can combine skip with sort to omit the top (for descending order) or bottom (for ascending order) results for a given query. Since the order of documents returned is not guaranteed in the absence of a sort, using skip without using sort omits arbitrary documents.

If the value of skip exceeds the number of matched documents for a query, then that query returns no documents.

const myDB = client.db("myDB");
const myColl = myDB.collection("fruits");
await myColl.insertMany([
  { "_id": 1, "name": "apples", "qty": 5, "rating": 3 },
  { "_id": 2, "name": "bananas", "qty": 7, "rating": 1 },
  { "_id": 3, "name": "oranges", "qty": 6, "rating": 2 },
  { "_id": 4, "name": "avocados", "qty": 3, "rating": 5 },
]);

Example

In the following example, we query the collection with a filter that matches all the documents and pass options that specifies sort and skip commands as query options. The sort option specifies that fruit documents that have higher rating values are returned before ones with lower ratings. The skip option specifies that the first 2 documents are omitted from the result:

// define an empty query document
const query = {};
const options = {
   // sort in descending (-1) order by rating
   sort : { rating: -1 },
   // omit the first two documents
   skip : 2,
}
const cursor = myColl.find(query, options);
for await (const doc of cursor) {
  console.dir(doc);
}

Since we specified that query skip the first 2 documents, the third and fourth highest rating documents are printed by the code snippet above:

{ "_id": 3, "name": "oranges", "qty": 6, "rating": 2 }
{ "_id": 2, "name": "bananas", "qty": 7, "rating": 1 }

The sort and skip options can also be specified as methods chained to the find method. The following two commands are equivalent:

myColl.find(query, { sort: { rating: -1}, skip: 2});
myColl.find(query).sort({rating: -1}).skip(2);