How to query date range on the MongoDB collection where the ISO date is stored in string field?

Question

Scenario: Consider I am having a collection called MyCollection, with following data:

{
    "_id" : 'MyUniqueID_01'
    "CreatedTime" : "2013-12-01T14:35:00Z",
    "LastModifiedTime" : "2013-12-01T13:25:00Z"
}

Now I want to query the MongoDB database where the above mentioned kind of data is in huge number of documents. And my query is based on date range i.e. using $gt, $gte, $lt & $lte

So my query may be something like:

db.MyCollection.find({ 'CreatedTime': {$gt: '2013-05-25T09:29:40.572Z'}})

Considering the above examples the expected result is, query has to get a document (since the "CreatedTime" : "2013-12-01T14:35:00Z" is greater than value passed in query '2013-05-25T09:29:40.572Z'); whereas it not, the issue is that field CreatedTime is in string format.

Question: Is there any way so that I can get my expected result perfectly without changing the string field type to date?

Answer 1

You can make the queries exactly as you did in the example.

The string ordering is consistent and will give you the exact relationship you want.