Insert Documents

Overview

In this guide, you can learn how to use the Ruby driver to add documents to a MongoDB collection by performing insert operations.

An insert operation inserts one or more documents into a MongoDB collection. You can perform an insert operation by using the following methods:

insert_one to insert a single document
insert_many to insert one or more documents

Sample Data

The examples in this guide use the restaurants collection in the sample_restaurants database from the Atlas sample datasets. To access this collection from your Ruby application, create a Mongo::Client object that connects to an Atlas cluster and assign the following values to your database and collection variables:

database = client.use('sample_restaurants')
collection = database[:restaurants]

To learn how to create a free MongoDB Atlas cluster and load the sample datasets, see the Get Started with Atlas guide.

The _id Field

In a MongoDB collection, each document must contain an _id field with a unique field value.

MongoDB allows you to manage this field in two ways:

Set the _id field for each document yourself, ensuring each value is unique.
Let the driver automatically generate unique BSON::ObjectId values for each document _id field.

Unless you can guarantee uniqueness, we recommend letting the driver automatically generate _id values.

Note

Duplicate _id values violate unique index constraints, which causes the driver to return an error.

To learn more about the _id field, see the Unique Indexes guide in the MongoDB Server manual.

To learn more about document structure and rules, see the Documents guide in the MongoDB Server manual.

Insert One Document

To add a single document to a MongoDB collection, call the insert_one method and pass the document you want to insert.

The following example inserts a document into the restaurants collection:

document = { name: 'Neighborhood Bar & Grill', borough: 'Queens' }
collection.insert_one(document)

Insert Multiple Documents

To add multiple documents to a MongoDB collection, call the insert_many method and pass a list of documents you want to insert.

The following example inserts two documents into the restaurants collection:

documents = [
  { name: 'Metropolitan Cafe', borough: 'Queens' },
  { name: 'Yankee Bistro', borough: 'Bronx' }
]
collection.insert_many(documents)

Modify Insert Behavior

You can pass a Hash object as a parameter to the insert_one method to set options to configure the insert operation. If you don't specify any options, the driver performs the insert operation with default settings.

The following table describes the options you can set to configure the insert_one operation:

Option	Description
`bypass_document_validation`	Instructs the driver whether to ignore document-level validation. For more information, see Schema Validation in the MongoDB Server manual. Defaults to `false`.
`comment`	Sets a comment to attach to the operation. For more information, see the insert command fields guide in the MongoDB Server manual.
`session`	Sets the session to use for the operation. To learn more about sessions, see Client Sessions and Causal Consistency Guarantees in the MongoDB Server manual.
`write_concern`	Sets the write concern for the operation. For more information, see the Write Concern guide in the MongoDB Server manual.

You can set the preceding settings on the insert_many method by passing a Hash as a parameter to the method call. You can also use the ordered option to specify the order in which the driver inserts documents into MongoDB.

Example

The following code uses the insert_many method to insert three new documents into a collection. Because the bypass_document_validation option is enabled, this insert operation bypasses document-level validation.

documents = [
  { name: 'Cloudy Day', borough: 'Brooklyn' },
  { name: 'Squall or Shine', borough: 'Staten Island' }
  { name: 'Rose Field', borough: 'Queens' }
]
options = { bypass_document_validation: true }
collection.insert_many(documents, options)

API Documentation

To learn more about any of the methods discussed in this guide, see the following API documentation:

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