Quick & Dirty Sequential IDs in MongoDB

1 November 2023 9 Minutes History

Mongo doesn't natively support generating sequential IDs. Here's a quick & dirty solution to get you up and going if you need sequential IDs.

hero

That Mongo doesn't natively support sequential IDs is one of the many knocks against it. Sure, you should be using GUID IDs in Mongo, but suppose you're working on a microservices conversion and you have a legacy mainframe that needs to be able to know what your objects are? If you're content just using Atlas, you can create a counter collection and add a trigger for auto-incrementing IDs fairly easily.

Suppose however that you can't use a pure Atlas solution - you'll need to implement this logic yourself in your own code. If you happen to be working in a microservices environment you have concurrency concerns - there might be multiple shards of your database and/or multiple replicas of your microservice.

Is a primary key generator really the sort of thing you want "quick and dirty"? Probably not. Am I doing it in prod? Yes.

Updating a counter collection #

As a prerequisite, ensure you have the Mongo driver:

go get go.mongodb.org/mongo-driver/mongo

Just as Mongo's tutorial for Atlas recommends, we'll implement a counter collection. This collection will contain one document per "kind" of ID we need to generate. If you have just one object that needs sequential IDs, then you'll only have one document in this collection. We'll represent this collection document with a struct. It only needs one field, sequence, which will represent the latest ID generated:

type MongoCounterDocument struct {
    sequence int `bson:"sequence"`
}

The ID of each document in the collection should be a string you hardcode or keep in a settings file (such as "personIdCounter"), and doesn't need to be in the document struct. Instead, we'll encapsulate that in a generator struct along with a reference to the collection:

type MongoIdGenerator struct {
    counterCollection *mongo.Collection
    counterDocumentId string
}

To implement the functionality to generate the next ID, we'll use the FindOneAndUpdate operation to increment sequence and return the new ID to us. We can specify a couple options here: we can upsert the document so that it will be created automatically if one isn't there for us (useful for integration tests), and we can specify that we want the operation to read and return us a copy of the document after the update has taken place.

func (generator *MongoIdGenerator) GetNextId() (int, error) {
    filter := bson.M{"_id": m.counterDocumentId}
    update := bson.M{"$inc": bson.M("sequence": 1)}
    options := options.FindOneAndUpdate().SetUpsert(true).SetReturnDocument(options.After)
    var updatedDocument MongoIdCounter
    err := m.counterCollection.FindOneAndUpdate(context.TODO(), filter, update, options).Decode(&updatedDocument)
    if err != nil {
        return 0, errors.New("Unable to update Mongo id counter collection.")
    }
    return updatedDocument.sequence, nil
}

FindOneAndUpdate is atomic and shouldn't have any concurrency concerns so long as you do not shard the counter collection.

But I don't want to have to hit Mongo every time I want a new id #

Huh, you and I think alike, I didn't either! To get around this, we can have our app generate multiple IDs each time it hits Mongo and use these IDs until it runs out locally.

With this approach you have the concern that if your app is spinning up and tearing down too frequently, you'll start losing IDs in the mix. There are various strategies to mitigate this, such as retrieving a small number of IDs from Mongo each time or persisting the cache of IDs, but I'm not going to get into those here.

We'll add nextId and maxId properties to the generator object, as well as an increment field to specify how many IDs we should generate each time:

 type MongoIdGenerator struct {
     counterCollection *mongo.Collection
     counterDocumentId string
+    incrementBy       int 
+    nextId            int 
+    maxId             int 
 }

We'll add a func to instantiate this at startup. It'll be important that your app only has one of these objects per "kind" of ID you need to generate:

func SetupMongoIdGenerator(collection *mongo.Collection, documentId string) *MongoIdGenerator {
    return $MongoIdGenerator{
        counterCollection   : collection,
        counterDocumentId   : documentId,
        // Adjust this up or down depending on how many IDs you want to generate at once:
        incrementBy         : 25,
        nextId              : 0,
        maxId               : 0
    }
}

And we can update our GetNextId function to consult Mongo or not if nextId equals maxId:

 func (generator *MongoIdGenerator) GetNextId() (int, error) {
+    if generator.nextId == generator.maxId { 
         filter := bson.M{"_id": m.counterDocumentId}
         update := bson.M{"$inc": bson.M("sequence": generator.incrementBy)}
         options := options.FindOneAndUpdate().SetUpsert(true).SetReturnDocument(options.After)
         var updatedDocument MongoIdCounter
         err := m.counterCollection.FindOneAndUpdate(context.TODO(), filter, update, options).Decode(&updatedDocument)
         if err != nil {
             return 0, errors.New("Unable to update Mongo id counter collection.")
         }
+        generator.nextId = updatedDocument.sequence - incrementBy 
+        generator.maxId = updatedDocument.sequence 
+    } 
-    return updatedDocument.sequence, nil 
+    generator.nextId += 1 
+    return generator.nextId, nil 
 }

We do have a concurrency concern here though - we want to ensure nextId and maxId are only being accessed one at a time. We can use a mutex in the generator for this. Update the generator:

 type MongoIdGenerator struct {
     counterCollection *mongo.Collection
     counterDocumentId string
     incrementBy       int
     nextId            int
     maxId             int
+    mutex             sync.Mutex 
 }

And add the following two to the beginning of GetNextId:

 func (generator *MongoIdGenerator) GetNextId() (int, error) {
+    generator.mutex.Lock() 
+    defer generator.mutex.Unlock() 
     if generator.nextId == generator.maxId {
         filter := bson.M{"_id": m.counterDocumentId}
         update := bson.M{"$inc": bson.M("sequence": generator.incrementBy)}
         options := options.FindOneAndUpdate().SetUpsert(true).SetReturnDocument(options.After)
         var updatedDocument MongoIdCounter
         err := m.counterCollection.FindOneAndUpdate(context.TODO(), filter, update, options).Decode(&updatedDocument)
         if err != nil {
             return 0, errors.New("Unable to update Mongo id counter collection.")
         }
         generator.nextId = updatedDocument.sequence - incrementBy
         generator.maxId = updatedDocument.sequence
     }
     generator.nextId += 1
     return generator.nextId, nil
 }

That should be that! Here's the final code all together:

type MongoCounterDocument struct {
    sequence int `bson:"sequence"`
}
type MongoIdGenerator struct {
    counterCollection *mongo.Collection
    counterDocumentId string
    incrementBy       int
    nextId            int
    maxId             int
    mutex             sync.Mutex
}
func SetupMongoIdGenerator(collection *mongo.Collection, documentId string) *MongoIdGenerator {
    return $MongoIdGenerator{
        counterCollection   : collection,
        counterDocumentId   : documentId,
        incrementBy         : 25,
        nextId              : 0,
        maxId               : 0
    }
}
func (generator *MongoIdGenerator) GetNextId() (int, error) {
    generator.mutex.Lock()
    defer generator.mutex.Unlock()
    if generator.nextId == generator.maxId {
        filter := bson.M{"_id": m.counterDocumentId}
        update := bson.M{"$inc": bson.M("sequence": generator.incrementBy)}
        options := options.FindOneAndUpdate().SetUpsert(true).SetReturnDocument(options.After)
        var updatedDocument MongoIdCounter
        err := m.counterCollection.FindOneAndUpdate(context.TODO(), filter, update, options).Decode(&updatedDocument)
        if err != nil {
            return 0, errors.New("Unable to update Mongo id counter collection.")
        }
        generator.nextId = updatedDocument.sequence - incrementBy
        generator.maxId = updatedDocument.sequence
    }
    generator.nextId += 1
    return generator.nextId, nil
}

Hi, I'm Ian

I'm a software engineer, architect, and team leader in Minneapolis. My career has largely focused on .NET and web technologies, spread across several industries. Currently I'm working for Crate & Barrel on their ecommerce solutions. You can find me on this blog, contributing to open source repositories, and at conferences around the Midwest.

If you'd like to keep up with me, please subscribe to my book club or RSS feed. If you'd like to help me out with server costs, I would be forever grateful if you bought me a coffee!

Some other posts you might be interested in: