Reading and Writing

All the create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations take a similar form and are defined on the IMongoCollection<TDocument> interface. All the required fields take the form of a positional parameter and, if any options exists, they are passed in as an instance of an options class. All methods are available in both synchronous and asynchronous versions. For example, the following method signatures exists:

long CountDocuments(FilterDefinition<TDocument> filter, CountOptions options = null);

Task<long> CountDocumentsAsync(FilterDefinition<TDocument> filter, CountOptions options = null);

As described, the filter is required and the options can be omitted.

A majority of the methods in the CRUD API take some form of a definition class. Many of these classes contain implicit conversions to make it easy to pass in common types of values like a JSON string or a BsonDocument. In addition, most of the definition classes contain a definition builder that can make it easy to build MongoDB specific syntax. See the Definitions and Builders section for more information.

Polymorphism

The driver supports polymorphic class hierarchies fully. To understand how discriminators are handled for entities, see the reference on polymorphism.

The requirement to use polymorphic hierarchies during CRUD operations is that the generic parameter on your collection instance must be the base class. For example, with a class hierarchy of Animals:

Animal
  - Cat
    - Lion
    - Tiger
  - Dog

The collection instance must be an IMongoCollection<Animal>.

Working with Subclasses

The OfType method applies a discriminating filter to all methods of an IMongoCollection<T>. For example, to work only with Cats from the “animals” collection:

IMongoCollection<Animal> animals = db.GetCollection<Animal>("animals");

IMongoCollection<Cat> cats = animals.OfType<Cat>();