Mongodb - Take only one element in nested array - arrays

Question

I'm using mongodb to store my data. My collection consists in a list of objects identified by a type a list of other objects for each of them.
An example of my collection is:
[
{
"type": "a",
"properties": [
{
"value": "value_a",
"date": "my_date_a"
},
{
"value": "value_b",
"date": "my_date_b"
},
...
]
},
...
]
Based on the above data structure, I want to retrieve all collections by a given type, taking for each of them only one element in the nested array (reducing the nested list to a list of only one element).
So, given a type "a", an example of the result may be:
[
{
"type": "a",
"properties": [
{
"value": "value_a",
"date": "my_date_a"
}
]
},
...
]
I'm started trying this query { "type": "a" } to filter the collections. But, how can I do to take only one "properties" element? I cannot use the "slice" operator.
Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

I'm assuming from your reference to slice, that you're not interested in matching a particular nested element, and rather just getting a value at a fixed index (eg, 0).
If you're willing to use the aggregation pipeline, you can use arrayElementAt within a projection:
db.collection.aggregate([
// matches documents with type 'a'
{ $match: { type: 'a' } },
// creates a new document for each
{ $project: {
// that contains the original value for type
type: 1,
// and the first element from the original properties for properties
properties: { $arrayElemAt: [ "$properties", 0 ] }
} }
])