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Bypass Schema Validation

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In some situations, you may need to bypass a collection's schema validation rules. For example, if you are restoring potentially invalid data from a backup to a collection that has validation rules. In this scenario, older documents may not meet new validation requirements.

Bypassing schema validation is done on a per-operation basis. If you bypass schema validation to insert an invalid document, any future updates to the invalid document must either:

  • Also bypass schema validation

  • Result in a valid document

You can use the following commands and methods to bypass validation on a per-operation basis:

For deployments that have enabled access control, to bypass document validation, the authenticated user must have bypassDocumentValidation action. The built-in roles dbAdmin and restore provide this action.

The following example creates a collection with schema validation, and then inserts an invalid document by bypassing the validation rules.

1

Create a students collection and use the $jsonSchema operator to set schema validation rules:

db.createCollection("students", {
validator: {
$jsonSchema: {
bsonType: "object",
required: [ "name", "year", "major", "address" ],
properties: {
name: {
bsonType: "string",
description: "must be a string and is required"
},
year: {
bsonType: "int",
minimum: 2017,
maximum: 3017,
description: "must be an integer in [ 2017, 3017 ] and is required"
}
}
}
}
} )
2

The following document is invalid because the year field is outside of the allowed bounds (2017-3017):

{
name: "Alice",
year: Int32( 2016 ),
major: "History",
gpa: Double(3.0),
address: {
city: "NYC",
street: "33rd Street"
}
}

To bypass the validation rules and insert the invalid document, run the following insert command, which sets the bypassDocumentValidation option to true:

db.runCommand( {
insert: "students",
documents: [
{
name: "Alice",
year: Int32( 2016 ),
major: "History",
gpa: Double(3.0),
address: {
city: "NYC",
street: "33rd Street"
}
}
],
bypassDocumentValidation: true
} )

To confirm that the document was successfully inserted, query the students collection:

db.students.find()

MongoDB returns the inserted document:

[
{
_id: ObjectId("62bcb4db3f7991ea4fc6830e"),
name: 'Alice',
year: 2016,
major: 'History',
gpa: 3,
address: { city: 'NYC', street: '33rd Street' }
}
]
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