Mongodb Aggregation count array/set size

Sorry I'm a little late to the party. Simply grouping on the 'user_id' and counting the result with a trivial group works just fine and doesn't run into doc size limits.

[
    {$match: {application: 'abc', date: {$gte: startDate, $lte: endDate}}},
    {$unwind: '$user_id'},
    {$group: {_id: '$user_id'}},
    {$group: {_id: 'singleton', count: {$sum: 1}}}
];

The following will return number of uniqueUsers per application. This will apply an group operation to a result of a group operation by using pipeline feature of mongodb.

{ $match: { application: "abc" } }, 
{ $unwind: "$users" }, 
{ $group: { _id: "$status", users: { $addToSet: "$users" } } }, 
{ $unwind:"$users" }, 
{ $group : {_id : "$_id", count : {$sum : 1} } }

Hopefully this will be done in an easier way in the following releases of mongo by a command which gives the size of an array under a projection. {$project: {id: "$_id", count: {$size: "$uniqueUsers"}}} https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-4899

Cheers