Get unique values from a collection in Meteor

Since Meteor doesn't support distinct in MongoDB (yet), I had to find a way to get distinct values myself. We do this with the wonderful underscore.js library.

• To use this you must first convert the Meteor cursor returned by .find() to an array by using .fetch() on your cursor. Example:

var myArray = CollectionName.find().fetch();

• Once we have a usable array, use the uniq function in underscore to return a bunch of unique arrays. You use the callback function to determine which unique value to seek. Note: this returns the full array, not just the value specified in the callback. We set sort to false in this instance.

var distinctArray = _.uniq(myArray, false, function(d) {return d.foo});

• Then you can use the pluck function to just return an array of the unique values

var disctinctValues = _.pluck(distinctArray, 'foo');

Woolah, I hope this helps someone out there.