How to enter multiple table data in mongoDB using json - json

Question

I am trying to learn mongodb. Suppose there are two tables and they are related. For example like this -
1st table has
First name- Fred, last name- Zhang, age- 20, id- s1234
2nd table has
id- s1234, course- COSC2406, semester- 1
id- s1234, course- COSC1127, semester- 1
id- s1234, course- COSC2110, semester- 1
how to insert data in the mongo db? I wrote it like this, not sure is it correct or not -
db.users.insert({
given_name: 'Fred',
family_name: 'Zhang',
Age: 20,
student_number: 's1234',
Course: ['COSC2406', 'COSC1127', 'COSC2110'],
Semester: 1
});
Thank you in advance

Answer 1

This would be a assuming that what you want to model has the "student_number" and the "Semester" as what is basically a unique identifier for the entries. But there would be a way to do this without accumulating the array contents in code.
You can make use of the upsert functionality in the .update() method, with the help of of few other operators in the statement.
I am going to assume you are going this inside a loop of sorts, so everything on the right side values is actually a variable:
db.users.update(
{
"student_number": student_number,
"Semester": semester
},
{
"$setOnInsert": {
"given_name": given_name,
"family_name": family_name,
"Age": age
},
"$addToSet": { "courses": course }
},
{ "upsert": true }
)
What this does in an "upsert" operation is first looks for a document that may exist in your collection that matches the query criteria given. In this case a "student_number" with the current "Semester" value.
When that match is found, the document is merely "updated". So what is being done here is using the $addToSet operator in order to "update" only unique values into the "courses" array element. This would seem to make sense to have unique courses but if that is not your case then of course you can simply use the $push operator instead. So that is the operation you want to happen every time, whether the document was "matched" or not.
In the case where no "matching" document is found, a new document will then be inserted into the collection. This is where the $setOnInsert operator comes in.
So the point of that section is that it will only be called when a new document is created as there is no need to update those fields with the same information every time. In addition to this, the fields you specified in the query criteria have explicit values, so the behavior of the "upsert" is to automatically create those fields with those values in the newly created document.
After a new document is created, then the next "upsert" statement that uses the same criteria will of course only "update" the now existing document, and as such only your new course information would be added.
Overall working like this allows you to "pre-join" the two tables from your source with an appropriate query. Then you are just looping the results without needing to write code for trying to group the correct entries together and simply letting MongoDB do the accumulation work for you.
Of course you can always just write the code to do this yourself and it would result in fewer "trips" to the database in order to insert your already accumulated records if that would suit your needs.
As a final note, though it does require some additional complexity, you can get better performance out of the operation as shown by using the newly introduced "batch updates" functionality.For this your MongoDB server version will need to be 2.6 or higher. But that is one way of still reducing the logic while maintaining fewer actual "over the wire" writes to the database.

Answer 2

You can either have two separate collections - one with student details and other with courses and link them with "id".
Else you can have a single document with courses as inner document in form of array as below:
{
"FirstName": "Fred",
"LastName": "Zhang",
"age": 20,
"id": "s1234",
"Courses": [
{
"courseId": "COSC2406",
"semester": 1
},
{
"courseId": "COSC1127",
"semester": 1
},
{
"courseId": "COSC2110",
"semester": 1
},
{
"courseId": "COSC2110",
"semester": 2
}
]
}