Bypass Schema Validation

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.

Context

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

Supported Operations

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

applyOps command
findAndModify command and db.collection.findAndModify() method
mapReduce command and db.collection.mapReduce() method
insert command
update command
$out and $merge stages for the aggregate command and db.collection.aggregate() method

Prerequisite

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.

Steps

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

Create a collection with validation rules

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"            }         }      }   }} )

Bypass the validation to insert an invalid document

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} )

Results

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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Handle Invalid Documents

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