Find Restaurants with Geospatial Queries
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Overview
MongoDB’sgeospatialindexing allows you to efficiently execute spatial queries on a collection that contains geospatial shapes and points. This tutorial will briefly introduce the concepts of geospatial indexes, and then demonstrate their use with$geoWithin
,$geoIntersects
, andgeoNear
.
To showcase the capabilities of geospatial features and compare different approaches, this tutorial will guide you through the process of writing queries for a simple geospatial application.
Suppose you are designing a mobile application to help users find restaurants in New York City. The application must:
- Determine the user’s current neighborhood using
$geoIntersects
, - Show the number of restaurants in that neighborhood using
$geoWithin
, and - Find restaurants within a specified distance of the user using
$nearSphere
.
This tutorial will use a2dsphere
index to query for this data on spherical geometry.
For more information on spherical and flat geometries, seeGeospatial Models.
Distortion
Spherical geometry will appear distorted when visualized on a map due to the nature of projecting a three dimensional sphere, such as the earth, onto a flat plane.
For example, take the specification of the spherical square defined by the longitude latitude points(0,0)
,(80,0)
,(80,80)
, and(0,80)
. The following figure depicts the area covered by this region:
Searching for Restaurants
Prerequisites
Download the example datasets fromhttps://raw.githubusercontent.com/mongodb/docs-assets/geospatial/neighborhoods.jsonandhttps://raw.githubusercontent.com/mongodb/docs-assets/geospatial/restaurants.json. These contain the collectionsrestaurants
andneighborhoods
respectively.
After downloading the datasets, import them into the database:
mongoimport
<
path
to
restaurants
.
json
>
-
c
restaurants
mongoimport
<
path
to
neighborhoods
.
json
>
-
c
neighborhoods
ThegeoNear
command requires a geospatial index, and almost always improves performance of$geoWithin
and$geoIntersects
queries.
Because this data is geographical, create a2dsphere
index on each collection using themongo
shell:
db
.
restaurants
.
createIndex
({
location
:
"2dsphere"
})
db
.
neighborhoods
.
createIndex
({
geometry
:
"2dsphere"
})
Exploring the Data
Inspect an entry in the newly-createdrestaurants
collection from within themongo
shell:
db
.
restaurants
.
findOne
()
This query returns a document like the following:
{
location
:
{
type
:
"Point"
,
coordinates
:
[
-
73.856077
,
40.848447
]
},
name
:
"Morris Park Bake Shop"
}
This restaurant document corresponds to the location shown in the following figure:
Because the tutorial uses a2dsphere
index, the geometry data in thelocation
field must follow theGeoJSON format.
Now inspect an entry in theneighborhoods
collection:
db
.
neighborhoods
.
findOne
()
This query will return a document like the following:
{
geometry
:
{
type
:
"Polygon"
,
coordinates
:
[[
[
-
73.99
,
40.75
],
...
[
-
73.98
,
40.76
],
[
-
73.99
,
40.75
]
]]
},
name
:
"Hell's Kitchen"
}
This geometry corresponds to the region depicted in the following figure:
Find the Current Neighborhood
Assuming the user’s mobile device can give a reasonably accurate location for the user, it is simple to find the user’s current neighborhood with$geoIntersects
.
Suppose the user is located at -73.93414657 longitude and 40.82302903 latitude. To find the current neighborhood, you will specify a point using the special$geometry
field inGeoJSONformat:
db
.
neighborhoods
.
findOne
({
geometry
:
{
$geoIntersects
:
{
$geometry
:
{
type
:
"Point"
,
coordinates
:
[
-
73.93414657
,
40.82302903
]
}
}
}
})
This query will return the following result:
{
"_id"
:
ObjectId
(
"55cb9c666c522cafdb053a68"
),
"geometry"
:
{
"type"
:
"Polygon"
,
"coordinates"
:
[
[
[
-
73.93383000695911
,
40.81949109558767
],
...
]
]
},
"name"
:
"Central Harlem North-Polo Grounds"
}
Find all Restaurants in the Neighborhood
You can also query to find all restaurants contained in a given neighborhood. Run the following in themongo
shell to find the neighborhood containing the user, and then count the restaurants within that neighborhood:
var
neighborhood
=
db
.
neighborhoods
.
findOne
(
{
geometry
:
{
$geoIntersects
:
{
$geometry
:
{
type
:
"Point"
,
coordinates
:
[
-
73.93414657
,
40.82302903
]
}
}
}
}
)
db
.
restaurants
.
find
(
{
location
:
{
$geoWithin
:
{
$geometry
:
neighborhood
.
geometry
}
}
}
).
count
()
This query will tell you that there are 127 restaurants in the requested neighborhood, visualized in the following figure:
Find Restaurants within a Distance
To find restaurants within a specified distance of a point, you can use either$geoWithin
with$centerSphere
to return results in unsorted order, ornearSphere
with$maxDistance
if you need results sorted by distance.
Unsorted with$geoWithin
To find restaurants within a circular region, use$geoWithin
with$centerSphere
.$centerSphere
is a MongoDB-specific syntax to denote a circular region by specifying the center and the radius in radians.
$geoWithin
does not return the documents in any specific order, so it may show the user the furthest documents first.
The following will find all restaurants within five miles of the user:
db
.
restaurants
.
find
({
location
:
{
$geoWithin
:
{
$centerSphere
:
[
[
-
73.93414657
,
40.82302903
],
5
/
3963.2
]
}
}
})
$centerSphere
’s second argument accepts the radius in radians, so you must divide it by the radius of the earth in miles. SeeCalculate Distance Using Spherical Geometryfor more information on converting between distance units.
Sorted with$nearSphere
You may also use$nearSphere
and specify a$maxDistance
term in meters. This will return all restaurants within five miles of the user in sorted order from nearest to farthest:
var
METERS_PER_MILE
=
1609.34
db
.
restaurants
.
find
({
location
:
{
$nearSphere
:
{
$geometry
:
{
type
:
"Point"
,
coordinates
:
[
-
73.93414657
,
40.82302903
]
},
$maxDistance
:
5
*
METERS_PER_MILE
}
}
})