Parse Date before insert pymongo - json

Question

I have the following type of json document which I need to insert in a mongodb collection with pymongo :
json={
"resource": "/items/6791111",
"user_id": 123456789,
"topic": "items",
"application_id":001,
"attempts": 1,
"sent": "2020-07-22T15:53:06.000-04:00",
"received":"2020-07-22T15:53:06.000-04:00"
}
the fields sent and received are strings so if I run :
collection.insert_one(json)
this will be saved as string in the database, how can I store directly as a date?
I tried something like this:
from dateutil.parser import parse
json['sent']=parse(json['sent'])
collection.insert_one(json)
but doesn't seems to me pretty good solution because I have documents which in some cases have several date fields or sometimes some date field is null (example in a order maybe the delivered field is null until the order is delivered)
something like this:
json2={
"resource": "/items/6791111",
"user_id": 123456789,
"topic": "items",
"application_id":001,
"attempts": 1,
"sent": "2020-07-22T15:53:06.000-04:00",
"received":Null
}
now I'm parsing the dates by hand using a function, but its really not useful at all
And I need to have the datefield parsed as dates so I can filter by time.

Answer 1

You can use attempt isoparse on each field which will convert any valid dates to datetime format and will therefore be stored in MongoDB as a BSON date type. Nulls will be unaffected.
from dateutil.parser import isoparse
k, v in json.items():
try:
json[k] = isoparse(v)
except Exception:
pass
Full worked example:
from pymongo import MongoClient
from dateutil.parser import isoparse
import pprint
collection = MongoClient()['mydatabase'].collection
json={
"resource": "/items/6791111",
"user_id": 123456789,
"topic": "items",
"application_id":1,
"attempts": 1,
"sent": "2020-07-22T15:53:06.000-04:00",
"received":"2020-07-22T15:53:06.000-04:00",
}
for k, v in json.items():
try:
json[k] = isoparse(v)
except Exception:
pass
collection.insert_one(json)
pprint.pprint(collection.find_one(), indent=4)
gives:
{ '_id': ObjectId('5fde015e794ced49eeaa7a65'),
'application_id': 1,
'attempts': 1,
'nulldate': None,
'received': datetime.datetime(2020, 7, 22, 19, 53, 6),
'resource': '/items/6791111',
'sent': datetime.datetime(2020, 7, 22, 19, 53, 6),
'topic': 'items',
'user_id': 123456789}