MongoDB Grails and Copying Collections

I currently find myself working on a project where Grails and MongoDB are the technology stack... in fact that in part is some of the reason for being interested in the project. I thought I would share 2 aspects of my learning so far:

Grails + Mongo

We spent at least 2 weeks trying to understand which approach we were going to take for our persistent tier. The general concensus was to use the Mongo GORM. We started down that path and ran into a bug and then a limitation on embedding. We got amazing support on the bug followed by the next release of the GORM option which fixed our initial document embedding concerns. We ran into more problems.

We switched to the morphia driver... once again... challenges caused lots of frustration. The challenges included getting other plugins to work with this driver, the fact that the morphia "domain" objects couldn't be in the standard grails domain folder, which further complicated mocking. Frustrations with getting full capabilities of getting spring security to work. It turns out that with spring security there are a number of relational assumptions (along with assumptions of objects being domain classes.. meaning they live in the grails domain package space) which cause problems when you are using NoSQL.

The morphia had another limitation we couldn't live with... we wanted the ability to have different types of objects mapped to the same collection. It appears to me that the Mongo efforts in the Grails space are bolt ons to a rational model. You can get it to work when thinking with a RDBMS mindset. They seem to break down with a NoSQL mindset... this certainly could be attributed to user error (meaning me). I believe we gave it a good try... however the project is under the gun and we didn't have time to "play" with it or wait for responses.

Alas we created our own solution... one of our significant constraints was to be prepared for extremely large scale. This had us duplicating a lot of documents not common in RDBMS solutions... along with the fact we needed to control the number of queries. Ideally we want 1 query for a page... certainly for the main page which is high laden with dynamic content.

Mongo Copying Documents - Collection to Collection

I'm really getting to like Mongo... a lot. One of the downsides is there is limited documentation... including limited forum comments on it. Because of this, I've decided to post interesting solutions to problems as I discover them... time permitting. so for todays tip. I recently needed to duplicate a "record" in mongo speak a document in a collection. There is so much information out there on how not to duplicate records that a google search at this point usually points you in the wrong direction. My situation was such that we have a CMS component to our application, which sets a publish day on content. What I needed was the ability to duplicate a record (so the BSON id would need to change and set a new publish day.

The first thing to recognize for those new to Mongo is that the Mongo console (the command line client to Mongo) works with javascript... so get your javascript fu ready... no.. not your jQuery fu... your plain jane generic javascript fu:)

Here is the solution I came up with:

db.NewsItem.find({newsType: "Blah"}).forEach( function(x){ x._id = new ObjectId(); x.publishDay=283;  db.NewsItem.insert(x)} );

So it turns out that you can pass a lambda expression to the forEach method of the collection. The trick is to assign a new ObjectId() to the _id, make any other assignments and then insert into your collection of choice... in this case back into the same collection. This comes in handy as well when you want to backup a collection real quick. (yea, I know you could use the mongodump and mongorestore, for a quick temp solution this just seems more convenient)

db.NewsItem.find({publishDay : 285}).forEach( function(x){ db.NewsItemBackup.insert(x)} );

Happy Coding!