Inserting and Querying Date with MongoDB and Nodejs

Question

I need some help finding a record by date in mongodb and nodejs.

I add the date to the json object in a scraping script as follows:

jsonObj.last_updated = new Date(); 

This object is inserted into mongodb. I can see it as follows:

 "last_updated" : "2014-01-22T14:56:59.301Z" 

Then in my nodejs script I do a findOne():

 var jObj = JSON.parse(line.toString());   collection.findOne(jObj,function(err, doc) {    if (doc){      console.log(doc._id);    } else  {      console.log('not found');    }  }); 

The object is not found. If I remove the last_updated field from the object it is found so it is definitely where the problem is.

If I isolate the field as follows:

collection.findOne({last_updated: '2014-01-22T14:56:59.301Z'},function(err, doc) {   if (doc){     console.log(doc._id);   } else  {     console.log('not found');   } }); 

Nothing comes back either. What am I doing wrong please?

Answer 1

You need to pass a date object and not a date string.

collection.findOne({last_updated: new Date('2014-01-22T14:56:59.301Z')},function(err, doc) { 

The MongoDB driver will transform it into ISODate:

{     "_id" : ObjectId("52dfe0c469631792dba51770"),     "last_updated" : ISODate('2014-01-22T14:56:59.301Z')  } 

Check these questions:

• MongoDB + nodejs : how to query ISODate fields?
• ISODate is not defined

Answer 2

To clarify. What is important to know is that:

• Yes, you have to pass a Javascript Date object.
• Yes, it has to be ISODate friendly
• Yes, from my experience getting this to work, you need to manipulate the date to ISO
• Yes, working with dates is generally always a tedious process, and mongo is no exception

Here is a working snippet of code, where we do a little bit of date manipulation to ensure Mongo can handle it correctly. In this example, I am using mongoose module and want results for rows whose date attribute is less than (ie. before) the date given as myDate param.

var inputDate = new Date(myDate.toISOString()); MyModel.find({     'date': { $lte: inputDate } })