Skip to main content

MongoDB error: An error occurred while deserializing the _id field of class … : Cannot deserialize string from BsonType ObjectId.

The last few weeks I’m having fun learning MongoDB. Having some experience with RavenDB, I hoped to re-use most of knowledge when building a MongoDB backend. However I have to conclude that no two No-SQL solutions are alike, so there is still a high learning curve.

I created a sample application, but when I tried to load some objects from the database, I got the following error:

An error occurred while deserializing the _id field of class Product: Cannot deserialize string from BsonType ObjectId.

Let’s have a look at the object I was using; I have a Product class with 2 properties and an ‘_id’ field. The ‘_id’ field is automatically generated by MongoDB for every object you create.

The problem is that behind the scenes MongoDB is storing all objects as BSON documents in the database. The ‘_id’ field isn’t an ordinary string but an ObjectId, a 12-byte BSON type, constructed using:

  • a 4-byte value representing the seconds since the Unix epoch,
  • a 3-byte machine identifier,
  • a 2-byte process id, and
  • a 3-byte counter, starting with a random value.

To fix our error, we have to update our Product class to use the ObjectId type:

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cleaner switch expressions with pattern matching in C#

Ever find yourself mapping multiple string values to the same result? Being a C# developer for a long time, I sometimes forget that the C# has evolved so I still dare to chain case labels or reach for a dictionary. Of course with pattern matching this is no longer necessary. With pattern matching, you can express things inline, declaratively, and with zero repetition. A small example I was working on a small script that should invoke different actions depending on the environment. As our developers were using different variations for the same environment e.g.  "tst" alongside "test" , "prd" alongside "prod" .  We asked to streamline this a long time ago, but as these things happen, we still see variations in the wild. This brought me to the following code that is a perfect example for pattern matching: The or keyword here is a logical pattern combinator , not a boolean operator. It matches if either of the specified pattern...
Read more