Mongodb native validation for embedded documents

[A S Gowri Sankar]

Hello! This is a cross post from Stack Overflow I posted few hours ago.

I'm looking for a way to add a validator to a collection such that an embedded document inside the main Mongo document could be entirely absent or if it's present a few of its attributes must be present.

I played around with the $or operator specifying that the `user` embedded document is not required (with the $exists operator set to false) OR the `name` field of the `user` embedded document is present and of $type `string`.

Apparently I'm not able to insert an empty document {} into such a collection as it throws a "Document failed validation" error.

What's wrong with the usage of query operators used in this validator? Please ask if you need more information. Thank you!

[A S Gowri Sankar]

Any pointers on this one? I'm completely clueless with very little documentation and help from SO and IRC channels.

[Rhys Campbell]

"validator" : { "$or" : [ { "user" : { "$exists" : "false", "$type" : "null" } }, { "user.name" : { "$type" : "string", "$exists" : "true" } } ] }

Have you tried without the $type: null test?

[A S Gowri Sankar]

Yes, Sir. Did try and still get the "Document failed validation" error.

[A S Gowri Sankar]

Just got an answer from the SO post and the problem was treating the value of $exists operators as strings, instead of boolean. So it looks like values such as "false", "true" are both treated as boolean true.

I wish Mongodb throws a validation error whenever it encounters such malformed values. Thank you!

On Thursday, November 23, 2017 at 1:07:10 AM UTC+5:30, A S Gowri Sankar wrote: