MongoDB Map & Reduce with Date filter

We are using MongoDB as primary DB at VersionEye, together with MongoID. Software package is a document in the “products” collection. These products collections has a subcollection with “versions”. Assume we want to know how many versions/artifacts existed for a given language to a given time?

That is not a simple query in MongoDB. This kind of queries can be handled with Map & Reduce. With Map & Reduce you can execute JavaScript on DB Level. Here is the current solution:

border = until_date.at_midnight + 1.day

map = %Q{
  function() {
    if ( this.versions == null || this.versions.count == 0 ) return;

    that_day = new ISODate("#{border.iso8601}");
    for (var version in this.versions){
      created = this.versions[version].created_at
      if (created != null && created.getTime() < that_day.getTime()){
        emit( this.versions[version]._id, { count: 1 } );
      }
    }
  }
}

reduce = %Q{
  function(key, values) {
    var result = { count: 0 };
    values.forEach(function(value) {
      result.count += value.count;
    });
    return result; 
  }
}

Product.where(:language => language, :created_at.lt => border ).map_reduce(map, reduce).out(inline: true)

The tricky part was this line:

that_day = new ISODate("#{border.iso8601}");

To find out how to convert a Ruby Date object into the JavaScript Date object.

Otherwise you have to know that even through you are iterating over a versions collection you can not access the version object through “version”! You have to access it this way:

this.versions[version]

Otherwise it works fine 🙂