Sometimes you want to store and retrieve raw JSON in MongoDB. With Spring Boot storing the JSON isn’t very hard, but retrieving can be a bit more challenging.

Setting up

To start using MongoDB from Spring Boot, you add the dependency to spring-boot-starter-data-mongodb

	<dependency>
		<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
		<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-mongodb</artifactId>
	</dependency>

And then you inject MongoTemplate into your class

@Autowired
private MongoTemplate mongoTemplate;

Inserting into MongoDB

Inserting JSON is just a matter of converting the JSON into a Document, and inserting that document into the right collection

String json = getJson();
Document doc = Document.parse(json);
mongoTemplate.insert(doc, "CollectionName");

Retrieving JSON

Retrieving JSON is a bit more complicated. First you need to get a cursor for the collection. This allows you to iterate over all the documents within that collection. Then you’ll retrieve each document from the collection, and cast it to a BasicDBObject. Once you have that, you can retrieve the raw JSON.

DBCursor cursor = mongoTemplate.getCollection("CollectionName").find();
Iterator iterator = cursor.iterator();
while (iterator.hasNext()){
   BasicDBObject next = (BasicDBObject) iterator.next();
   String json = next.toJson();
   // do stuff with json
}

Transforming raw JSON to Object

With Jackson you can transform the retrieved JSON to an object. However, your object might miss a few fields, since MongoDB adds some to keep track of the stored documents. To get around this problem, you need to configure the ObjectMapper to ignore those extra fields.

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper().configure(DeserializationFeature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES, false)
MyObject object = mapper.readValue(json, MyObject.class);