Question

I have been trying to use MongoLabs api to simplify my life, and for the most part it was working until I tried to push updates to the db using php and curl, anyway no dice. My code is similar to this:

$data_string = json_encode('{"user.userEmail": "USER_EMAIL", "user.pass":"USER_PASS"}');
try { 
$ch = curl_init();

//need to create temp file to pass to curl to use PUT
$tempFile = fopen('php://temp/maxmemory:256000', 'w');
if (!$tempFile) {
    die('could not open temp memory data');
}
fwrite($tempFile, $data_string);
fseek($tempFile, 0); 

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "PUT");
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER, true);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_INFILE, $tempFile); // file pointer

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, DB_API_REQUEST_TIMEOUT);                                                                    
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data_string);                                                     
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(                                                                          
    'Content-Type: application/json',                                                                       
    'Content-Length: ' . strlen($data_string),
    )                                                                              
);   

$cache = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
} catch (Exception $e) {
    return FALSE;
}

My problem seems to be with MongoLab’s api. The code bit works perfect except for the fact that labs tells me that the data I am passing is an ‘Invalid object{ “user.firstName” :”Pablo”,”user.newsletter”:”true”}: fields stored in the db can’t have . in them.’. I have tried passing a file and using the postfields, but neither worked.

When I test it on firefox’s Poster plugin the value work fine. If someone out there has a better understanding of MongoLabs stuff I would love some enlightenment. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

After sometime working with some other functionality of the project I realized my mistake, and ultimately the source of the confusion.

The curl PUT was intended to send modifier operations to MongoDB. I was sending all my data as JSON and was interrupting decoding it to use in PHP then re-encoding part of it to send back. So the orignal data received looks something like this:

{"userEmail":"[e-mail]","pass":"****", "$oid":"5555", "$set":{"user.firstName":"Pablo","user.newsletter":"true"}}

The problem was that I was grabbing the value of “$set” object (in php) and reencoding only the value, {"user.firstName":"Pablo","user.newsletter":"true"} without the operator "$set" and was sending it giving the error. In this case the proper string to send would have been {"$set":{"user.firstName":"Pablo","user.newsletter":"true"}}

While this is a simple mistake I hope that the next time someone does something like this and gets an invalid object error that they are luck enough to find this.