The stage {$unwind: '$field'} currently produces no output documents for an input with any of the following criteria:

1. field is not present.
2. field is present, but has a value of null.
3. field is an empty array

SERVER-12685 is requesting that condition 1 can optionally produce output. This ticket is requesting that condition 3 can optionally produce output. For example, with a syntax like

{
  $unwind: {
    path: '$field',
    includeEmpty: <bool>
  }
}

The old syntax of {unwind: '$field'} should still be accepted as well.

This would enable a $lookUp + $unwind to produce a stream of documents that is equivalent to a left outer join. Currently this is not possible as the $lookUp stage produces an empty array for documents which have no matches in the foreign collection. If one were to unwind the as field afterwards, such a non-matching document would not produce any results.

e.g. If you have these collections:

And you use the following pipeline:

db.products.aggregate([
  {
    $lookUp: {
      from: 'sales',
      localField: '$_id',
      foreignField: '$product_id',
      as: 'sale'
  },
// Produces two documents:
// {_id: 'tshirt', p: 12, sale: [{_id: 0, ...}, {_id: 1, ...} ]}
// {_id: 'shorts', p: 30, sale: []}
  {
    $unwind: '$sale'
  }
]) 

You'll get the following output:

{_id: 'tshirt', p: 30, sale: {_id: 0, product_id: 0, q: 2}}
{_id: 'tshirt', p: 30, sale: {_id: 1, product_id: 0, q: 1}}

Which does not include any output for the second document, and hence is not an outer join.

If you replaced the $unwind stage with the proposed

{$unwind: {field: '$sale', includeEmpty: true}}

You would instead get the following results:

{_id: 'tshirt', p: 30, sale: {_id: 0, product_id: 0, q: 2}}
{_id: 'tshirt', p: 30, sale: {_id: 1, product_id: 0, q: 1}}
{_id: 'shorts', p: 12, sale: null}

It may also be desirable to specify a default value in this case rather than always using null