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Database Manual

Data Modeling

Schema Validation

Bypass Schema Validation

In some situations, you may need to bypass a collection's schema validation rules. For example, if you are restoring potentially invalid data from a backup to a collection that has validation rules. In this scenario, older documents may not meet new validation requirements.

Context

Bypassing schema validation is done on a per-operation basis. If you bypass schema validation to insert an invalid document, any future updates to the invalid document must either:

Also bypass schema validation
Result in a valid document

Supported Operations

You can use the following commands and methods to bypass validation on a per-operation basis:

applyOps command
findAndModify command and db.collection.findAndModify() method
mapReduce command and db.collection.mapReduce() method
insert command
update command
$out and $merge stages for the aggregate command and db.collection.aggregate() method

Prerequisite

For deployments that have enabled access control, to bypass document validation, the authenticated user must have bypassDocumentValidation action. The built-in roles dbAdmin and restore provide this action.

Steps

The following example creates a collection with schema validation, and then inserts an invalid document by bypassing the validation rules.

Create a collection with validation rules

Create a students collection and use the $jsonSchema operator to set schema validation rules:

db.createCollection("students", {
   validator: {
      $jsonSchema: {
         bsonType: "object",
         required: [ "name", "year", "major", "address" ],
         properties: {
            name: {
               bsonType: "string",
               description: "must be a string and is required"
            },
            year: {
               bsonType: "int",
               minimum: 2017,
               maximum: 3017,
               description: "must be an integer in [ 2017, 3017 ] and is required"
            }
         }
      }
   }
} )

Bypass the validation to insert an invalid document

The following document is invalid because the year field is outside of the allowed bounds (2017-3017):

{
   name: "Alice",
   year: Int32( 2016 ),
   major: "History",
   gpa: Double(3.0),
   address: {
      city: "NYC",
      street: "33rd Street"
   }
}

To bypass the validation rules and insert the invalid document, run the following insert command, which sets the bypassDocumentValidation option to true:

db.runCommand( {
   insert: "students",
   documents: [
      {
         name: "Alice",
         year: Int32( 2016 ),
         major: "History",
         gpa: Double(3.0),
         address: {
            city: "NYC",
            street: "33rd Street"
         }
      }
   ],
   bypassDocumentValidation: true
} )

Results

To confirm that the document was successfully inserted, query the students collection:

db.students.find()

MongoDB returns the inserted document:

[
   {
      _id: ObjectId("62bcb4db3f7991ea4fc6830e"),
      name: 'Alice',
      year: 2016,
      major: 'History',
      gpa: 3,
      address: { city: 'NYC', street: '33rd Street' }
   }
]

Learn More

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Handle Invalid Documents

View Existing Rules