Find objects between two dates MongoDB
I've been playing around storing tweets inside mongodb, each object looks like this:
{
"_id" : ObjectId("4c02c58de500fe1be1000005"),
"contributors" : null,
"text" : "Hello world",
"user" : {
"following" : null,
"followers_count" : 5,
"utc_offset" : null,
"location" : "",
"profile_text_color" : "000000",
"friends_count" : 11,
"profile_link_color" : "0000ff",
"verified" : false,
"protected" : false,
"url" : null,
"contributors_enabled" : false,
"created_at" : "Sun May 30 18:47:06 +0000 2010",
"geo_enabled" : false,
"profile_sidebar_border_color" : "87bc44",
"statuses_count" : 13,
"favourites_count" : 0,
"description" : "",
"notifications" : null,
"profile_background_tile" : false,
"lang" : "en",
"id" : 149978111,
"time_zone" : null,
"profile_sidebar_fill_color" : "e0ff92"
},
"geo" : null,
"coordinates" : null,
"in_reply_to_user_id" : 149183152,
"place" : null,
"created_at" : "Sun May 30 20:07:35 +0000 2010",
"source" : "web",
"in_reply_to_status_id" : {
"floatApprox" : 15061797850
},
"truncated" : false,
"favorited" : false,
"id" : {
"floatApprox" : 15061838001
}
How would I write a query which checks the created_at and finds all objects between 18:47 and 19:00? Do I need to update my documents so the dates are stored in a specific format?
Querying for a Date Range (Specific Month or Day) in the MongoDB Cookbook has a very good explanation on the matter, but below is something I tried out myself and it seems to work.
items.save({
name: "example",
created_at: ISODate("2010-04-30T00:00:00.000Z")
})
items.find({
created_at: {
$gte: ISODate("2010-04-29T00:00:00.000Z"),
$lt: ISODate("2010-05-01T00:00:00.000Z")
}
})
=> { "_id" : ObjectId("4c0791e2b9ec877893f3363b"), "name" : "example", "created_at" : "Sun May 30 2010 00:00:00 GMT+0300 (EEST)" }
Based on my experiments you will need to serialize your dates into a format that MongoDB supports, because the following gave undesired search results.
items.save({
name: "example",
created_at: "Sun May 30 18.49:00 +0000 2010"
})
items.find({
created_at: {
$gte:"Mon May 30 18:47:00 +0000 2015",
$lt: "Sun May 30 20:40:36 +0000 2010"
}
})
=> { "_id" : ObjectId("4c079123b9ec877893f33638"), "name" : "example", "created_at" : "Sun May 30 18.49:00 +0000 2010" }
In the second example no results were expected, but there was still one gotten. This is because a basic string comparison is done.
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 (here i am using mongoose module and want results for rows whose date attribute is less than (before) the date given as myDate param) can handle it correctly:
var inputDate = new Date(myDate.toISOString());
MyModel.find({
'date': { $lte: inputDate }
})