Using Waterline from Sails 0.10 is there a way to find distinct values from my database collection?

[Dave Sag]

Using `Sails.js` version `0.10.x`, assume I have a model `Dog`, populated as follows (writtenout in `yaml` format for convenience, but in my case it's in a `mongo` db.)

    dogs:

    -  breed: "wolf"

       name: "Fido"

    -  breed: "wolf"

       name: "Roger"

    -  breed: "dingo"

       name: "Nipper"

    -  breed: "dingo"

       name: "Ernie"

    -  breed: "corgi"

       name: "Bernadi"

    -  breed: "corgi"

       name: "Queenie"

    -  breed: "poodle"

       name: "Christopher"

    -  breed: "poodle"

       name: "Tony"

So now I want to create a list of the available breeds.

    Dog.find().exec(err, dogs) {

      breeds = [];

      dogs.each(function(dog)) {

        if (breeds.indexOf(dog.breed) === -1) breeds.push(dog.breed);

      }

      ...

    }

    

Is there a simpler way to do this with fewer hits on the database? Something like

    Dog.find().distinct('breed').exec(function(err, breeds){

      ...

    });

I've found [this closed Waterline issue](https://github.com/balderdashy/waterline/issues/60) which seems to indicate that I could use a `.distinct` method but I tried it and alas no dice.

    Object [object Object] has no method 'distinct'

    

How might I go about this in a database efficient manner?

(this is written up in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24340490/how-to-extract-distinct-values-from-a-mongo-database-using-waterline-and-sails-j )

Cheers

Dave

[Dave Sag]

Just to let you know, someone on Stackoverflow worked this out for me - the answer was to use Dog.native…

cheers

dave

[Ambroise Dhenain]

A link would be great ;)

[Dave Sag]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24340490/how-to-extract-distinct-values-from-a-mongo-database-using-waterline-and-sails-j

Sent from my iPhone

[Mandeep Gulati]

It's already resolved but just for the record, whenever you need some functionality which you are not able to find in waterline, look for the same in the database's native code. for SQL databases, waterline provides Model.query() function to execute the SQL queries. And for mongodb, it provides Model.native() function for the same. 

Since Mongodb has an api helper function distinct, you can use this in Model.native().