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mongodbcasbah

Casbah: How to Update and Embedded Object When Field Names Have Spaces?

Supposing I had the following document in a database:

{"_id":"test", "with space":{"a name":1}}

How can I write a $set query in Casbah to update "with space"."a name" to 2?

I was thinking something along the lines of:

collection.update(MongoDBObject("_id" -> "test"), "'with space'.'a name'" $set 2)

But what if my field names were unknown and I had to compose them at runtime? Is there any way to "escape" them in a safe way? (For example, what if any of them contains single quotes, etc.)

Solution

  • There isn't any explicit escaping required for MongoDB; you can just pass a variable name, eg:

     val key = MongoDBObject(name + '.' + embeddedname -> "somevalue")

    or

     val key = MongoDBObject("with space.a name" -> "somevalue")

    While MongoDB does allow you to use any valid UTF-8 character in key names aside from '.' and a leading '$', you would generally be best sticking to alphanumeric key names plus underscore.

    If you are concerned about safety of user-provided input, see How does MongoDB address SQL or Query injection?