How to limit number of updating documents in mongodb

Question

How to implement somethings similar to db.collection.find().limit(10) but while updating documents?

Now I'm using something really crappy like getting documents with db.collection.find().limit() and then updating them.

In general I wanna to return given number of records and change one field in each of them.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use:

db.collection.find().limit(NUMBER_OF_ITEMS_YOU_WANT_TO_UPDATE).forEach(
    function (e) {
        e.fieldToChange = "blah";
        ....
        db.collection.save(e);
    }
);

(Credits for forEach code: MongoDB: Updating documents using data from the same document)

What this will do is only change the number of entries you specify. So if you want to add a field called "newField" with value 1 to only half of your entries inside "collection", for example, you can put in

db.collection.find().limit(db.collection.count() / 2).forEach(
    function (e) {
        e.newField = 1;
        db.collection.save(e);
    }
);

If you then want to make the other half also have "newField" but with value 2, you can do an update with the condition that newField doesn't exist:

db.collection.update( { newField : { $exists : false } }, { $set : { newField : 2 } }, {multi : true} );