How to use spring-data mongodb without objectId to upsert?

Question

I am trying to use spring-data to replace our current usage of POJO to Document with mongodb, in this particular case instead of using a field as Id for the entity I use some fields.

For example, if I have this pojo:

class Thing {
    public String firstName;
    public String lastName;
    public Int age;
}

At the moment to save it to mongodb I first do a conversion to Document:

Document doc = new Document();
doc.append("firstName", thing.firstName);
doc.append("lastName", thing.lastName);
doc.append("age", thing.age);

Then I create a query:

BasicDBObject query = new BasicDBObject(
    and(
        new BasicDBObject("firstName", thing.firstName),
        new BasicDBObject("lastName", thing.lastName)) 

And then I upsert the doc using mongodb driver.

collection.updateOne(query, document, UpdateOptions().upsert(true))

This way I get the age updated only and do not need to bother about the ObjectId that there is no meaning for me.

Now I want to change it to spring-data-mongodb to be less error prone when writing the document conversion part and be more productive. But I could not find how to do something similar with spring-data-mongodb, the save in MongoRepository api is base in the ObjectId and I can not find any annotation or bean to override/create to let me do something like this.

In a perfect world I would have something like a composite key for spring-data-mongodb. So for instance I would have to just write my POJO this way:

class Thing {
    @Id public String firstName;
    @Id public String lastName;
    public Int age;
}

Or (not the better case but maybe acceptable)

class ThingKey {
    public String firstName;
    public String lastName;    
}

class Thing {
    @Id public ThingKey thingKey;
    public Int age;
}

And the save would be able to figure out that this is a upsert to a existing entity and do act with this regards.

PS: The POJOs here are simplified versions to help understand the problem and are not the final version that I am using.

Answer 1

There is a section on "upserting" in the official docs . It looks like you have to use either the upsert() or findAndModify() on MongoTemplate .

Alternatively, you could just do a find() , perform your changes to the object that is returned, and then do a save() .