MongoDB Mobile Capacitor Plugin

MongoDB is one of the easiest databases to use for small javascript-based projects, so it is a fantastic fit for many capacitor apps. The goal of this project is to provide a full-featured interface to allow using MongoDB Mobile from a capacitor app.

This project does not atttempt to clean up the interface and all documents sent are in MongoDB's canonical Extended JSON format. For those who don't undrestand what that means, a MongoDB document may look like this:

{
  _id: ObjectId("5d12cabe21c6fa8a7deb6b9d"),
  name: "This is a cool thing",
  number: 127,
  date: Date("2019-05-13 17:33:22")
}

Since the above document can't be represented accurately using json, and all communication with cordova plugins is done using json, we use the extended json format and it looks like this:

{
  _id: {$oid: "5d12cabe21c6fa8a7deb6b9d"},
  name: "This is a cool thing",
  number: {$numberInt: "127"},
  date: {$date: {$numberLong: "1557790402"}}
}

In general when you pass things into the plugin to save in the database it'll do its best to figure out what you meant even if you didn't use the full canonical format, but things like ObjectIds must be passed as an {$oid: "..."} or it will just be treated as a string.

Installing

npm install @hamstudy/capacitor-mongodb-mobile

Current State

With beta.3 out we believe we have full support on iOS and Android -- but we've so far only tested a limited number of the APIs. We have not yet assembled an entire test suite, but at this point it's very likely that any lingering issues should be relatively easy to fix as long as we are aware of them and particularly if tests for them are added to the Capacitor MongoDB Mobile Test App test suite (which uses the MongoDB Mobile Client library, but if needed tests could be added which don't).

Special considerations for Android

To work on an android emulator you must use one based on x86_64 -- the default is usually x86 based and will not work due to missing mongodb libraries.

MongoDB Mobile Client

Because dealing with the above is a pain (and also because the interface forced on us by having to do everything with a single layer API is awkward) we have created a project which provides a wrapper around this plugin which provides an interface very similar to the node-native-mongodb driver API.

For more information, see the mongodb-mobile-client project.

Helping out

This was created for use with our own internal projects but of course I hope it'll catch on; I'll try to be around (taxilian) on the Capacitor Slack channels if anyone would like to help; even just making the docs a little more accessible would be awesome.