Can I query MongoDB ObjectId by date?

Popping Timestamps into ObjectIds covers queries based on dates embedded in the ObjectId in great detail.

Briefly in JavaScript code:

/* This function returns an ObjectId embedded with a given datetime *//* Accepts both Date object and string input */function objectIdWithTimestamp(timestamp) {    /* Convert string date to Date object (otherwise assume timestamp is a date) */    if (typeof(timestamp) == 'string') {        timestamp = new Date(timestamp);    }    /* Convert date object to hex seconds since Unix epoch */    var hexSeconds = Math.floor(timestamp/1000).toString(16);    /* Create an ObjectId with that hex timestamp */    var constructedObjectId = ObjectId(hexSeconds + "0000000000000000");    return constructedObjectId}/* Find all documents created after midnight on May 25th, 1980 */db.mycollection.find({ _id: { $gt: objectIdWithTimestamp('1980/05/25') } });

In pymongo, it can be done this way:

import datetimefrom bson.objectid import ObjectIdmins = 15gen_time = datetime.datetime.today() - datetime.timedelta(mins=mins) dummy_id = ObjectId.from_datetime(gen_time)result = list(db.coll.find({"_id": {"$gte": dummy_id}}))

Using inbuilt function provided by mongodb drivers in in Node.js lets you query by any timestamp:

var timestamp = Date.now();var objectId = ObjectID.createFromTime(timestamp / 1000);

Alternatively, to search for records before the current time, you can simply do:

var objectId = new ObjectID(); // or ObjectId in the mongo shell

Source: http://mongodb.github.io/node-mongodb-native/api-bson-generated/objectid.html