How do I search for an object by its ObjectId in the mongo console?

Question

I've found this question answered for C# and Perl, but not in the native interface. I thought this would work:

db.theColl.find( { _id: ObjectId("4ecbe7f9e8c1c9092c000027") } )

The query returned no results. I found the 4ecbe7f9e8c1c9092c000027 by doing db.theColl.find() and grabbing an ObjectId. There are several thousand objects in that collection.

I've read all the pages that I could find on the mongodb.org website and didn't find it. Is this just a strange thing to do? It seems pretty normal to me.

Answer 1

Not strange at all, people do this all the time. Make sure the collection name is correct (case matters) and that the ObjectId is exact.

Documentation is here

> db.test.insert({x: 1})

> db.test.find()                                               // no criteria
{ "_id" : ObjectId("4ecc05e55dd98a436ddcc47c"), "x" : 1 }      

> db.test.find({"_id" : ObjectId("4ecc05e55dd98a436ddcc47c")}) // explicit
{ "_id" : ObjectId("4ecc05e55dd98a436ddcc47c"), "x" : 1 }

> db.test.find(ObjectId("4ecc05e55dd98a436ddcc47c"))           // shortcut
{ "_id" : ObjectId("4ecc05e55dd98a436ddcc47c"), "x" : 1 }