Method to retrieve latest document

Method 1: Query collection for latest document

Situation: To get the first document in a collection, the default findOne() or find_one() function works. However, how do we get the latest document?

There are several approaches, but I think this one is the simplest:

# first get the total number of documents in the collection
db.collection.count()

# Then use skip()
db.collection.find().skip(db.collection.count() - 1).pretty()

Here’s the implementation in Python

The example is taken from the Bounty Board project.

# find latest document to inspect

# client is a dictionary of databases
db = client['bountyboard']

# collections are attributes of databases
bounties_col = db['bounties']


latest_bounties_doc = bounties_col.find().skip(n_bounties - 1)

print(list(latest_bounties_doc)[0].keys())

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