Самое простое решение - использовать setUnion (Mongo 2.6 +):
db.users.aggregate([
{'$addFields': {'favorites.books': {'$setUnion': ['$favorites.books', []]}}}
])
Другая (более длинная) версия, основанная на идее ответа @ kynan's , но сохраняет все остальные поля без явного их указания (Mongo 3.4 +):
> db.users.aggregate([
{'$unwind': {
'path': '$favorites.books',
// output the document even if its list of books is empty
'preserveNullAndEmptyArrays': true
}},
{'$group': {
'_id': '$_id',
'books': {'$addToSet': '$favorites.books'},
// arbitrary name that doesn't exist on any document
'_other_fields': {'$first': '$$ROOT'},
}},
{
// the field, in the resulting document, has the value from the last document merged for the field. (c) docs
// so the new deduped array value will be used
'$replaceRoot': {'newRoot': {'$mergeObjects': ['$_other_fields', "$$ROOT"]}}
},
// this stage wouldn't be necessary if the field wasn't nested
{'$addFields': {'favorites.books': '$books'}},
{'$project': {'_other_fields': 0, 'books': 0}}
])
{ "_id" : ObjectId("4f6cd3c47156522f4f45b26f"), "name" : "robert", "favorites" :
{ "books" : [ "The Art of Computer Programmning", "Graph Theory", "Algorithms in C++" ] } }