The cluster getShardVersion command and the shard getShardVersion command will append all chunks + all global indexes if fullMetadata is set to true. However, if the list of chunks and indexes exceeds the max bson size, the user could get a partial list or nothing at all.

In the cluster command, if the list of chunks is going to exceed the max bson size, we will not return any chunks whereas for indexes, we will append a partial list of indexes. The shard command has the same behavior as the cluster command for indexes , but doesn't check the bson size for chunks.

In the cases where the BSON size is exceeded and we are returning partial or empty responses to the user, we should indicate to the user in some way that the returned metadata is incomplete.