mongodump - range query on timestamp filed raising FailedToParser Error

Question

The following is the structure of the documents:

{
  "_id" : ObjectId("4fccd39c9d8597a034d183b1"),
  "image" : "23ef514f8201320c2d7253e4bf28edf6",
  "owner" : "1b8c335c902ac4ab128ee8ed773bee04",
  "pageviews" : 57,
  "source" : "b1b3849b472edada1b922c786df5b46f",
  "timestamp" : ISODate("2012-06-04T00:00:00Z")
}

I am doing the following mongodump query to dump all documents with timestamp greater than November 1, 2013:

mongodump -d dbname -c coll_name -q "{source: "7e04f65e47ed3ddfeb21716a247e3fa6", timestamp: {\$gte: new Date(2013, 10, 1)}}"

And it shows:

assertion: 16619 code FailedToParse: FailedToParse: Expecting '}' or ',': offset:13

Even though the same query object (except for the backslash used for escaping $gte) works fine in mongo shell. What am I doing wrong?

P.S. the version of MongoDB is 2.4.6

Answer 1

You have a problem with your nested quotes:

mongodump -d dbname -c coll_name -q "{source: "7e04f65e47ed3ddfeb21716a247e3fa6", timestamp: {\$gte: new Date(2013, 10, 1)}}"
# ----------------------------------^---------^

I'd use single quotes on the outside:

mongodump -d dbname -c coll_name -q '{source: "7e04f65e47ed3ddfeb21716a247e3fa6", timestamp: {$gte: new Date(2013, 10, 1)}}'

That also lets you avoid escaping the $gte too. And if it doesn't like the new Date then you could use:

{$gte: new Date(1383264000000)}

---

For posterity, it seems that the -q parser doesn't like the three argument form of the Date constructor nor does it like the ISODate function that MongoDB usually uses for dates and timestamps. I get confusing assertions failures like:

Assertion: 10340:Failure parsing JSON string near: timestamp

when I try either of those. This is pretty puzzling to me but sometimes it is better to just quietly walk away once a workable solution is found.