MongoDB - upsert involving lists

Question

I\'m a MongoDB newbie and wanted to ask how to write an update command involving upsert and list.

Basically I want to accomplish something like this:

Answer 1

You can't mix the positional operator ("$") and an upsert; the "$" will be treated as a field name during the insert. You can't do this for new documents, only existing one.

I suggested a structure more like this:

{"_id" : ObjectId("4c28f62cbf8544c60506f11d"),
"some_other_data":"goes here",
"trips": { 
    "2010-05-10":
       [{"lat":21.321231, "lng": 16.8783234, "updated_at": "Mon May 10 2010 15:24:35"}, 
        {"lat":21.321231, "lng": 16.8783234, "updated_at": "Mon May 10 2010 15:24:24"}],
    "2010-05-08": 
       [{"lat":21.324239, "lng": 16.8735234, "updated_at": "Mon May 8 2010 11:18:05"},
        {"lat":21.311234, "lng": 16.8743271, "updated_at": "Mon May 8 2010 11:17:55"}, 
        {"lat":21.321238, "lng": 16.8782219, "updated_at": "Mon May 8 2010 11:17:45"}]
    }
}

Then you can issue an update like this:

db.mycollection.update({application_id: "MyTestApp", "trips.2010-05-10":{$exists:true}},
                       {$push: {"trips.2010-05-10": {lat:11, lng:11} }}, 
                       true);

results in this being inserted.

> db.mycollection.find()
{ "_id" : ObjectId("4c2931d17b210000000045f0"), 
    "application_id" : "MyTestApp", 
    "trips" : { "2010-05-10" : [ { "lat" : 11, "lng" : 11 } ] } }

and running it again give you this:

> db.mycollection.find()
{ "_id" : ObjectId("4c2932db7b210000000045f2"), 
    "application_id" : "MyTestApp", 
    "trips" : { "2010-05-10" : 
        [ { "lat" : 11, "lng" : 11 }, 
          { "lat" : 11, "lng" : 11 } ] } }