This stage is used to select certain fields from a collection. We can also add, remove or reshape a key.

It is rare that you ever need to retrieve all the fields in your documents. It is good practice to return only those fields you need so as to avoid processing more data than is necessary.

example

Consider a books collection with the following document:

{
  "_id" : 1,
  title: "abc123",
  isbn: "0001122223334",
  author: { last: "zzz", first: "aaa" },
  copies: 5,
  lastModified: "2016-07-28"
}
{
  "_id" : 2,
  title: "Baked Goods",
  isbn: "9999999999999",
  author: { last: "xyz", first: "abc", middle: "" },
  copies: 2,
  lastModified: "2017-07-21"
}
{
  "_id" : 3,
  title: "Ice Cream Cakes",
  isbn: "8888888888888",
  author: { last: "xyz", first: "abc", middle: "mmm" },
  copies: 5,
  lastModified: "2017-07-22"
}

The following $project stage uses the REMOVE variable to exclude the author.middle field only if it equals "":

db.books.aggregate( [
   {
      $project: {
         title: 1,
         "author.first": 1,
         "author.last" : 1,
         "author.middle": {
            $cond: {
               if: { $eq: [ "", "$author.middle" ] },
               then: "$$REMOVE",
               else: "$author.middle"
            }
         }
      }
   }
] )

The aggregation operation results in the following output:

{ "_id" : 1, "title" : "abc123", "author" : { "last" : "zzz", "first" : "aaa" } }
{ "_id" : 2, "title" : "Baked Goods", "author" : { "last" : "xyz", "first" : "abc" } }
{ "_id" : 3, "title" : "Ice Cream Cakes", "author" : { "last" : "xyz", "first" : "abc", "middle" : "mmm" } }