Meteor - collection.find() always returns all fields

Question

Ran into this (slightly annoying problem) I'm trying to look up all records in a collection and not show (or show) a specific field (score). This is just an example and not reflective of my actual code, but the problem is always reproducible. The fields I am excluding are very large and I'm merely trying to generate a menu of available records.

Commands like

    players.find({},{score:1})     players.find({},{score:0}) 

Always return every field, instead of triggering the exclude/include in mongodb. Am I worried about nothing, since the template potentially can control what data gets rendered to html? Still feels like the data is transferred to the client side regardless; and shows up in the console.

Answer 1

your syntax is off a bit, it should be

CollectionName.find({}, {fields: {'onlyThisField':1}}); 

or

CollectionName.find({}, {fields: {'everythingButThisField':0}}); 

your template does indeed control what data is displayed, but there are still many scenarios where field limiting makes sense - privacy of data or efficiency (some fields of all records, all fields of the 'current' record) are two common ones

you didnt mention it, but this usually is within a publish function - see http://docs.meteor.com/#meteor_publish - the fields modifier is also available on the client, but there it does not limit data sent down to client, just to the template - server side field reduction/selection has different benefits

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double check that you've removed the autopublish package too, however you should see a warning if you have that active and write your own publish functions, which is where you would most commonly use fields