Insert or Update in a Single Operation
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Overview
If your application stores and modifies data in MongoDB, you probably use
insert and update operations. In certain workflows, whether you perform
an insert or update operation depends on whether the document exists.
In these cases, you can streamline your application logic by using the
upsert
option available in the following methods:
If the query filter passed to these methods does not find any matches and
you set the upsert
option to true
, MongoDB inserts the update
document. Let's go through an example.
Performing an Update
Suppose your application tracks the current location of food trucks,
storing the nearest address data in the myDB.foodTrucks
collection,
which resembles the following:
[ { name: "Haute Skillet", address: "42 Avenue B" }, { name: "Lady of the Latke", address: "35 Fulton Rd" }, ... ]
As an application user, you read about a food truck changing its regular location and want to apply the update. This update might resemble the following:
const myDB = client.db("myDB"); const myColl = myDB.collection("foodTrucks"); const query = { name: "Deli Llama" }; const update = { $set: { name: "Deli Llama", address: "3 Nassau St" }}; const options = {}; myColl.updateOne(query, update, options);
If a food truck named "Deli Llama" exists, the method call above updates the document in the collection. However, if there are no food trucks named "Deli Llama" in your collection, no changes are made.
Performing an Upsert
Consider the case in which you want to add information about the food
truck even if it does not yet exist in your collection. Rather than
first querying whether it exists to determine whether to insert or
update the document, we can set upsert
to true
in our call to
updateOne()
as follows:
const query = { name: "Deli Llama" }; const update = { $set: { name: "Deli Llama", address: "3 Nassau St" }}; const options = { upsert: true }; myColl.updateOne(query, update, options);
After you run the operation above, your collection looks similar to the
following, even if the "Deli Llama"
document did not exist in your collection
before the operation:
[ { name: "Haute Skillet", address: "42 Avenue B" }, { name: "Lady of the Latke", address: "35 Fulton Rd" }, { name: "Deli Llama", address: "3 Nassau St" }, ... ]