For discrete opfibrations with weakly filtered categories, the map taking a pair to its connected components of a category is a bijection. For surjectivity, send two base objects in the same component to a common target and lift both arrows. For injectivity, choose common targets upstairs for two representatives; a cocone over the resulting finite connected diagram downstairs makes their lifted composites agree. Hence the representatives have a common target in the pullback in a category. Over a filtered category, the component functor on the slice of discrete opfibrations preserves all finite categorical limits: it preserves pullbacks and takes the terminal object to a singleton.
A filtered category is nonempty, any two objects have arrows to a common object, and any parallel pair is equalized by some arrow . Equivalently, every finite diagram has a cocone: first choose a common target for its finitely many objects, then successively equalize the finitely many discrepancies along its arrows. A weakly filtered category requires a cocone only for finite nonempty connected diagrams. Equivalently, each connected component of a category is filtered. To see this, two objects in one component are joined by a finite zigzag; a cocone on that zigzag gives a common target, and a parallel-pair diagram gives the equalization condition. Conversely a connected diagram lies in one filtered component. An empty category is weakly filtered, since it has no such diagrams.
The unique outgoing-arrow lifting property is precisely that of a discrete opfibration. Let have this property, with weakly filtered. Take a diagram with finite, nonempty and connected, and choose a cocone in . Lift each uniquely from , obtaining . For an arrow , the arrow and the lift have the same source and the same image . Unique lifting gives equality of the arrows and, importantly, . Connectedness of makes all targets a single object . The lifts are a cocone in , so the domain of a discrete opfibration over a weakly filtered category is weakly filtered.
Consider discrete opfibrations and and their pullback in a category . The assumed creation of pullbacks describes its objects as pairs with , and its arrows as pairs with . There is a canonical map
where denotes connected components of a category. Assume the vertices are weakly filtered categories.
For surjectivity, choose components and whose images belong to the same component of . That component is filtered, so there are arrows and . Lifting them from and gives and with . Thus maps to the chosen component pair.
For injectivity, suppose and have the same images under . Filteredness of the relevant components upstairs gives arrows
Write and . In the four arrows make a finite connected diagram with objects . It has a cocone, so there are and with
Lift from and from , obtaining arrows to with . Their composites with form an arrow of , and their composites with form an arrow . Hence the two representatives lie in the same component. This proves the connected components of discrete-opfibration pullbacks formula
The map is the canonical comparison, so this is preservation of the pullback, not just an accidental bijection of its objects.
Now fix a small filtered category . Every object of has weakly filtered domain by the lifting argument, and every arrow of this slice is a discrete opfibration. Pullbacks in the slice are the created pullbacks above; their resulting domains are weakly filtered as well, since a pullback projection is a discrete opfibration onto a weakly filtered domain. The terminal slice object is . Because is nonempty and filtered, it is connected, so is a singleton. Thus the component functor preserves the terminal object and pullbacks. These construct every finite categorical limit: binary products are pullbacks over the terminal object, and equalizers are pullbacks along a diagonal into a binary product. Therefore the functor from this slice to sets preserves all finite limits.