MongoDB: upsert sub-document

No there isn’t really a better solution to this, so perhaps with an explanation.

Suppose you have a document in place that has the structure as you show:

{ 
  "name": "foo", 
  "bars": [{ 
       "name": "qux", 
       "somefield": 1 
  }] 
}

If you do an update like this

db.foo.update(
    { "name": "foo", "bars.name": "qux" },
    { "$set": { "bars.$.somefield": 2 } },
    { "upsert": true }
)

Then all is fine because matching document was found. But if you change the value of “bars.name”:

db.foo.update(
    { "name": "foo", "bars.name": "xyz" },
    { "$set": { "bars.$.somefield": 2 } },
    { "upsert": true }
)

Then you will get a failure. The only thing that has really changed here is that in MongoDB 2.6 and above the error is a little more succinct:

WriteResult({
    "nMatched" : 0,
    "nUpserted" : 0,
    "nModified" : 0,
    "writeError" : {
        "code" : 16836,
        "errmsg" : "The positional operator did not find the match needed from the query. Unexpanded update: bars.$.somefield"
    }
})

That is better in some ways, but you really do not want to “upsert” anyway. What you want to do is add the element to the array where the “name” does not currently exist.

So what you really want is the “result” from the update attempt without the “upsert” flag to see if any documents were affected:

db.foo.update(
    { "name": "foo", "bars.name": "xyz" },
    { "$set": { "bars.$.somefield": 2 } }
)

Yielding in response:

WriteResult({ "nMatched" : 0, "nUpserted" : 0, "nModified" : 0 })

So when the modified documents are 0 then you know you want to issue the following update:

db.foo.update(
    { "name": "foo" },
    { "$push": { "bars": {
        "name": "xyz",
        "somefield": 2
    }}
)

There really is no other way to do exactly what you want. As the additions to the array are not strictly a “set” type of operation, you cannot use $addToSet combined with the “bulk update” functionality there, so that you can “cascade” your update requests.

In this case it seems like you need to check the result, or otherwise accept reading the whole document and checking whether to update or insert a new array element in code.