It has been more than a year, but this may be useful for others, so here is my answer:
I was trying accomplish this same thing, in order to allow a grace period after an entry deletion, so the user can cancel the operation afterwards.
As stated by Mike Bennett, you can use a TTL index making documents expire at a specific clock time.
Yo have to create an index, setting the expireAfterSeconds
to zero:
db.yourCollection.createIndex({ "expireAt": 1 }, { expireAfterSeconds: 0 });
This will not affect any of the documents in your collection, unless you set expireAfterSeconds on a particular document like so:
db.log_events.insert( {
"expireAt": new Date('July 22, 2013 14:00:00'),
"logEvent": 2,
"logMessage": "Success!"
} )
Example in mongoose
Model
var BeerSchema = new Schema({
name: {
type: String,
unique: true,
required: true
},
description: String,
alcohol: Number,
price: Number,
createdAt: { type: Date, default: Date.now }
expireAt: { type: Date, default: undefined } // you don't need to set this default, but I like it there for semantic clearness
});
BeerSchema.index({ "expireAt": 1 }, { expireAfterSeconds: 0 });
Deletion with grace period
Uses moment for date manipulation
exports.deleteBeer = function(id) {
var deferred = q.defer();
Beer.update(id, { expireAt: moment().add(10, 'seconds') }, function(err, data) {
if(err) {
deferred.reject(err);
} else {
deferred.resolve(data);
}
});
return deferred.promise;
};
Revert deletion
Uses moment for date manipulation
exports.undeleteBeer = function(id) {
var deferred = q.defer();
// Set expireAt to undefined
Beer.update(id, { $unset: { expireAt: 1 }}, function(err, data) {
if(err) {
deferred.reject(err);
} else {
deferred.resolve(data);
}
});
return deferred.promise;
};