How can I generate an ObjectId with mongoose?
I'd like to generate a MongoDB ObjectId
with Mongoose. Is there a way to access the ObjectId
constructor from Mongoose?
This question is about generating a new
ObjectId
from scratch. The generated ID is a brand new universally unique ID.Another question asks about creating an
ObjectId
from an existing string representation. In this case, you already have a string representation of an ID—it may or may not be universally unique—and you are parsing it into anObjectId
.
Solution 1:
You can find the ObjectId
constructor on require('mongoose').Types
. Here is an example:
var mongoose = require('mongoose');
var id = mongoose.Types.ObjectId();
id
is a newly generated ObjectId
.
Note: As Joshua Sherman points out, with Mongoose 6 you must prefix the call with new
:
var id = new mongoose.Types.ObjectId();
You can read more about the Types
object at Mongoose#Types documentation.
Solution 2:
You can create a new MongoDB ObjectId
like this using mongoose:
var mongoose = require('mongoose');
var newId = new mongoose.mongo.ObjectId('56cb91bdc3464f14678934ca');
// or leave the id string blank to generate an id with a new hex identifier
var newId2 = new mongoose.mongo.ObjectId();
Solution 3:
I needed to generate mongodb ids on client side.
After digging into the mongodb source code i found they generate ObjectIDs using npm bson
lib.
If ever you need only to generate an ObjectID without installing the whole mongodb / mongoose package, you can import the lighter bson
library :
const bson = require('bson');
new bson.ObjectId(); // 5cabe64dcf0d4447fa60f5e2
Note: There is also an npm project named bson-objectid
being even lighter
Solution 4:
With ES6 syntax
import mongoose from "mongoose";
// Generate a new new ObjectId
const newId2 = new mongoose.Types.ObjectId();
// Convert string to ObjectId
const newId = new mongoose.Types.ObjectId('56cb91bdc3464f14678934ca');