Get Random Documents from MongoDB

While finalizing my first draft of nodecards, I stumbled on retrieving random documents from MongoDB. Nodecards is a small open source project which I use to try out some new technologies. It is a simple Flashcard application, written in node.js. It is kinda quick'n'dirty coded stuff, so don’t expect clean lines of code, yet. Because it was not so easy and I am not really sure that I have taken the right way I want to present you my implementation of retrieving random documents from MongoDB.

Get random within the range of a collection

To get the random document i just call count() at the collection.
After that I used skip() within the find to skip a number of documents. The skip is based on Math.random() and the previous estimated max range. Moreover I added a limit(1) to retrieve just one document. In a nutshell: My way to get random documents is by skipping documents based on a random number and limit the size to one. If you have some better and more efficient ways to do, please let me know.

Get random within a custom scope

Furthermore I had the idea to reduce the number on documents by adding a specific user defined condition. I passed in a max value that has been chosen by a user. Based on that max value I count how much elements are in the db.coll.correct array and retrieve only documents where the number of containing elements is lower than the max value. Cheers, Frank