Question

If I have loaded the following json into a BSON document:

{
    "contact":
    { "firstname":"Pete"
        ,"surname":"Jones"
        ,"company":[{"name":"Virgin","notes":"some virgin notes"},{"name":"IBM","notes":"a great big IT company"}]
    }

    ,"response":
    {
        "_id":"123"
        ,"profileid":"567"
        ,"localdate":"12 Apr 2011 14:34:23"
    }
}

I can detect if a given element exists using this:

if (suppliedDoc.Contains("_id"))

but I can’t address nested element using this syntax:

if (suppliedDoc.Contains("response._id"))

What is the correct syntax for addressing nested elements? And is there a better way to detect the existence of root or nested elements? I am using the official C# driver. Thanks.

Answer 1

You’re probably after something like

if (suppliedDoc.Contains("response")
    && suppliedDoc["reponse"].AsBsonDocument.Contains("_id"))
{
    //...
}

which I agree is kind of awkward.

It wouldn’t take too much effort though to write an extension method on BsonDocument that takes a string with punctuations in it, splits it by the ., and drills down using the method shown above.