Hi. I’d like to create a view that will select a random document of a specified type. For example, let’s say I have the following documents:
{
"uid": 1,
"name": "Bill",
"company": "ABC"
}
{
“uid”: 2,
“name”:“Todd”,
“company”:“ABC”
}
{
“uid”: 14,
“name”: “Sara”,
“company”: “DEF”
}
I’d like to create a view that will get a single employee from company ABC, by random index. I’m new to Couchbase, so my logic may be way off, but I’m thinking I must first know the total number of documents with “company” equal to “ABC” (N), then generate a random number < N, and finally get the document in that index.
That seems complicated compared to how you’d get a random row, so I’m wondering if I’m missing something here. Is there a way to accomplish this in a view? If anyone could point me in the right direction, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
This can be made much simpler by choosing the right keying scheme for your documents. My approach to this would be to base the keys of a counter in Couchbase. In pseudo code this looks like this
now all you have todo to get a random document is read the counter state, generate a random number between 1-and the counter value, and do a get, again in pseudo code
Deciding on a good keying strategy is very important when using Couchbase and there are many options. A quick intro to it can be found in this Couchbase Webinar
How does this answer address the need for the randomly selected document to satisfy a specific condition? In this case, how is it guaranteed that the selected documented will be from “company ABC”?