mongodb get elements which was inserted after some document

Question

I have a document and I need to query mongodb database to return me all the documents which was inserted after current document.

Is it possible and how to do that query?

Answer 1

If you are using Insert time stamp as on of the parameter, you can query like below

> db.foo.find()
{ "_id" : ObjectId("514bf8bbbe11e483111af213"), "Name" : "abc", "Insert_time" : ISODate("2013-03-22T06:22:51.422Z") }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("514bf8c5be11e483111af214"), "Name" : "xyz", "Insert_time" : ISODate("2013-03-22T06:23:01.310Z") }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("514bf8cebe11e483111af215"), "Name" : "pqr", "Insert_time" : ISODate("2013-03-22T06:23:10.006Z") }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("514bf8eabe11e483111af216"), "Name" : "ijk", "Insert_time" : ISODate("2013-03-22T06:23:38.410Z") }
> 

Here my Insert_time corresponds to the document inserted time, and following query will give you the documents after a particular Insert_time,

> db.foo.find({Insert_time:{$gt:ISODate("2013-03-22T06:22:51.422Z")}})
{ "_id" : ObjectId("514bf8c5be11e483111af214"), "Name" : "xyz", "Insert_time" : ISODate("2013-03-22T06:23:01.310Z") }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("514bf8cebe11e483111af215"), "Name" : "pqr", "Insert_time" : ISODate("2013-03-22T06:23:10.006Z") }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("514bf8eabe11e483111af216"), "Name" : "ijk", "Insert_time" : ISODate("2013-03-22T06:23:38.410Z") }
> 

Answer 2

If you do not override the default _id field you can use that objectID (see the mongodb docs) to make a comparison by time. For instance, the following query will find all the documents that are inserted after curDoc has been inserted (assuming none overwrite the _id field):

>db.test.find({ _id : {$gt : curDoc._id}})

Note that these timestamps are not super granular, if you would like a finer grained view of the time that documents are inserted I encourage you to add your own timestamp field to the documents you are inserting and use that field to make such queries.