Question

I’m using MongoDB and official C# driver 0.9

I’m just checking how embedding simple documents works.

There are 2 easy classes:

public class User
{
    public ObjectId _id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public IEnumerable<Address> Addresses { get;set; }
}

public class Address
{
    public ObjectId _id { get; set; }
    public string Street { get; set; }
    public string House { get; set; }
}

I create a new user:

var user = new User
{
    Name = "Sam",
    Addresses = (new Address[] { new Address { House = "BIGHOUSE", Street = "BIGSTREET" } })
};

collection.Insert(user.ToBsonDocument());

The user is successfully saved, so is his address.

After typing

db.users.find()

in MongoDB shell, I got the following result:

{ "_id" : ObjectId("4e572f2a3a6c471d3868b81d"), "Name" : "Sam",  "Addresses" : [
        {
                "_id" : ObjectId("000000000000000000000000"),
                "Street" : "BIGSTREET",
                "House" : "BIGHOUSE"
        }
] }

Why is address’ object id 0?

Doing queries with the address works though:

collection.FindOne(Query.EQ("Addresses.Street", streetName));

It returns the user “Sam”.

Answer 1

Use BsonId attribute:

public class Address
{
    [BsonId]
    public string _id { get; set; }
    public string Street { get; set; }
    public string House { get; set; }
}

Identifying the Id field or property

To identify which field or property of
a class is the Id you can write:

public class MyClass {
    [BsonId]
    public string SomeProperty { get; set; }
}

Driver Tutorial

Edit

It’s actually not working. I will check later why.
If you need get it work use following:

    [Test]
   public void Test()
    {
        var collection = Read.Database.GetCollection("test");

        var user = new User
        {
            Name = "Sam",
            Addresses = (new Address[] { new Address { House = "BIGHOUSE", Street = "BIGSTREET", _id = ObjectId.GenerateNewId().ToString() } })
        };

        collection.Insert(user.ToBsonDocument());
    }