Getting a single object from mongodb in C#

Question

I've picked up a piece of code that is using the MongoDB driver like this to get a single object from a collection...this can't be right, can it? Is there a better way of getting this?

IMongoCollection<ApplicationUser> userCollection;
....
userCollection.FindAsync(x => x.Id == inputId).Result.ToListAsync().Result.Single();

Answer 1

Yes, there is.

First of all don't use FindAsync, use Find instead. On the IFindFluent result use the SingleAsync extension method and await the returned task inside an async method:

async Task MainAsync()
{
    IMongoCollection<ApplicationUser> userCollection = ...;

    var applicationUser = await userCollection.Find(_ => _.Id == inputId).SingleAsync();
}

The new driver uses async-await exclusively. Don't block on it by using Task.Result.

Answer 2

You should limit your query before executing, otherwise you will first find all results and then only read one of it.

You could either specify the limit using FindOptions in FindAsync, or use the fluent syntax to limit the query before executing it:

var results = await userCollection.Find(x => x.Id == inputId).Limit(1).ToListAsync();
ApplicationUser singleResult = results.FirstOrDefault();

The result from ToListAsync will be a list but since you limited the number of results to 1, that list will only have a single result which you can access using Linq.

Answer 3

I could not get the method:

coll.Find(_ => _.Id == inputId).SingleAsync();

To work as I was getting the error

InvalidOperationException: Sequence contains more than one element c#

So I ended up using .FirstOrDefault()

Example:

public FooClass GetFirstFooDocument(string templatename)
        {
            var coll = db.GetCollection<FooClass>("foo");
            FooClass foo = coll.Find(_ => _.TemplateName == templatename).FirstOrDefault();
            return foo; 
        }