Creating a C# Client, and Listing, and Adding Data in MongoDB

May 22, 2021

In this previous post I wrote about how you can install MongoDB, and use the built in clients to interrogate the data. In this post I’ll cover setting up a simple C# client to interrogate the database.

Bring in a NuGet Package

As with many integrations in the last 10 years, 90% of the job is installing the right NuGet package:



Install-Package MongoDB.Driver

Once that’s installed, you should have access to the SDK. You’ll need the following using statement:



using MongoDB.Driver;

Connecting to the MonoDB Instance

It actually took me a while to work out the correct format here; for the default instance, you can simply use this for the connection string:



mongodb://localhost:27017

So to connect to the DB, you would use this:



MongoClient dbClient = new MongoClient("mongodb://localhost:27017");
var db = dbClient.GetDatabase("testdb");

See the referenced previous post if you’re interested where testdb came from.

Collections

As we saw in the previous post, Mongo works around the concept of collections - it’s roughly analogous to a table. The list the collections:



MongoClient dbClient = new MongoClient("mongodb://localhost:27017");
var db = dbClient.GetDatabase("testdb");

var collections = await db.ListCollectionsAsync();
            
foreach (var col in collections.ToList())
{
    Console.WriteLine(col.ToString());
}

Let’s see what inserting data would look like.

Inserting Data

In fact, inserting data is very straightforward. We need to introduce a new type here, called a BsonDocument. BSON is a Binary JSON document, and to all intents and purposes, it’s JSON; this means that you can create a document such as this:



            var document = new BsonDocument()
            {
                { "test", "test1" },
                { "test2", "test2" },
                { "test3", "test3" }
            };

Or, indeed, any valid JSON document.

To insert this into the DB, you would just call InsertOne:



            var collection = db.GetCollection<BsonDocument>("testcollection");
            await collection.InsertOneAsync(document);

You can insert many records by calling InsertMany:



            var documents = new List<BsonDocument>()
            {
                new BsonDocument()
                {
                    { "test", "test1" },
                    { "test2", "test2" },
                    { "test3", "test3" }
                },
                new BsonDocument()
                {
                    { "Date", DateTime.Now },
                    { "test2", 12 },
                    { "test3", "hello" }
                }
            };

            var collection = db.GetCollection<BsonDocument>("testcollection");
            await collection.InsertManyAsync(documents);

References

https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/quick-start-c-sharp-and-mongodb-starting-and-setup