---
title: "Retrieving Data from MongoDB | Docs"
description: "This walkthrough shows you how to retrieve data from MongoDB with Node and Express."
url: https://www.zinggrid.com/docs/data/mongodb
---

```text
experiment_id: web-retrieval-v1
fixture_id: /docs/data/mongodb.md
mode: provenance
representation: markdown
origin_response_id: 5867d1dab6e34e5e14f805896bcebcd6
version: 2026-10-21
version_created_at_utc: 2026-10-21T20:42:35.667Z
version_nonce: 43a168c085f565fafe1f9c4d28751ad0
generated_at_utc: 2026-11-08T23:36:15.626Z
response_nonce: 74ced2e6229b1a95cd1b58648259141b
```

# Retrieving Data from MongoDB

In this guide, we'll walk you through how to retrieve data from MongoDB with Node/Express and incorporate it in your grid.

> **Note:** In the examples below, we are using MongoDB with Node and Express. We assume that you have MongoDB installed and are running a local instance of your database. If not, refer to the [MongoDB Documentation](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/tutorial/getting-started/).

For our example, we set up a database `mydb`, which has the collection `users` with 3 documents:

```javascript
{ name: "Tim", age: 21 },
{ name: "Alice", age: 30 },
{ name: "Henry", age: 45 }
```

## Connecting to the Database

From the command line, we'll start a mongod process and pass in our database directory, like so:

`mongod --dbpath=<dbdirname>`

Then, in our server.js file, we'll create a connection to the server and our database `mydb`, like so:

```javascript
var MongoClient = require('mongodb').MongoClient;
var express = require('express');
var app = express();

var url = 'mongodb://localhost:27017';

MongoClient.connect(url, function(err, client) {
  db = client.db('mydb');
});
```

## Populating the Grid

To fetch the documents in the `users` collection to use in our grid, we'll create a route path at `/mydb`, which has the array of documents.

```javascript
app.get('/mydb', function(req, res) {
  db.collection('users').find({}).toArray(function(err, docs) {
    res.send(docs);
  });
})
```

Now in our HTML file, we can create our grid and set the `src` attribute to this URL to read from the database.

```html
<zing-grid src="http://localhost:3000/mydb"></zing-grid>
```

Then, we'll run our server from the command line with:

```
node server.js
```

## MongoDB Grid

Here is our complete grid pulling in data from our MongoDB database:

[Example code](https://app.zingsoft.com/demos/embed/N7Y400QR)

## Customizing the Grid

By default, MongoDB adds an **_id** field for each document. If you don't want to include a certain field in your grid, you can specify this using `<zg-colgroup>` and `<zg-column>`. Below, we show only the **name** field of our documents:

[Example code](https://app.zingsoft.com/demos/embed/DDRV8ONU)