Search for Substring in several fields with MongoDB and Mongoose

Your use case is a good fit for text search.

Define a text index on your schema over the searchable fields:

trackingSchema.index({    tracking_number: 'text',    zip_code: 'text',    'delivery_info.recipient': 'text',    'delivery_info.street': 'text',    'delivery_info.city': 'text'}, {name: 'search'});

Join your search terms into a single string and execute the search using the $text query operator:

var search = ['15232', 'julian'];Test.find({$text: {$search: search.join(' ')}}, function(err, docs) {...});

Even though this passes all your search values as a single string, this still performs a logical OR search of the values.

Why just dont try

var trackingSchema = mongoose.Schema({  tracking_number: String,  zip_code: String,  courier: String,  user_id: Number,  created: { type: Date, default: Date.now },   international_shipment: { type: Boolean, default: false },   delivery_info: {     recipient: String,     street: String,     city: String  }});var Tracking = mongoose.model('Tracking', trackingSchema );var search = [ "word1", "word2", ...]var results = []for(var i=0; i<search.length; i++){    Tracking.find({$or : [      { tracking_number : search[i]},       {zip_code: search[i]},       {courier: search[i]},       {delivery_info.recipient: search[i]},       {delivery_info.street: search[i]},       {delivery_info.city: search[i]}]     }).map(function(tracking){    //it will push every unique result to variable results    if(results.indexOf(tracking)<0) results.push(tracking);    });

Okay, I came up with this.

My schema now has an extra field search with an array of all my searchable fields:

var trackingSchema = mongoose.Schema({    ...    search: [String]});

With a pre-save hook, I populate this field:

trackingSchema.pre('save', function(next) {  this.search = [ this.tracking_number ];  var searchIfAvailable = [    this.zip_code,    this.delivery_info.recipient,    this.delivery_info.street,    this.delivery_info.city  ];  for (var i = 0; i < searchIfAvailable.length; i++) {    if (!validator.isNull(searchIfAvailable[i])) {      this.search.push(searchIfAvailable[i].toLowerCase());    }  }  next();});

In the hope of improving performance, I also index that field (also the user_id as I limit search results by that):

trackingSchema.index({ search: 1 });trackingSchema.index({ user_id: 1 });

Now, when searching I first list all substrings I want to look for in an array:

var andArray = [];var searchTerms = searchRequest.split(" ");searchTerms.forEach(function(searchTerm) {  andArray.push({    search: { $regex: searchTerm, $options: 'i'    }  });});

I use this array in my find() and chain it with an $and:

  Tracking.    find({ $and: andArray }).      where('user_id').equals(userId).      limit(pageSize).      skip(pageSize * page).      exec(function(err, docs) {         // hooray!      });

This works.