blog/source/_posts/2013-08-23-mongoid-use-objectid-as-created-at.markdown

layout	title	date	comments	categories	description
post	Mongoid: Use ObjectId as created_at	2013-08-23 07:34	true	mongodb rails mongoid	Mongoid: Use ObjectId as created_at

Update: Nov 20 2014: add setter

One great feature of Mongodb is, that the first bytes of each ObjectID contains the time, they were generated. This can be exploited to mimic the well known created_at field in rails. First put this file in your lib directory.

#lib/mongoid/created.rb
module Mongoid
  module CreatedAt
    # Returns the creation time calculated from ObjectID
    #
    # @return [ Date ] the creation time
    def created_at
      id.generation_time
    end

    # Set generation time of ObjectId.
    # Note: This will modify the ObjectId and
    # is therefor only useful for not persisted documents
    #
    # @return [ BSON::ObjectId ] the generated object id
    def created_at=(date)
      self.id = BSON::ObjectId.from_time(date)
    end
  end
end

If you are still using mongoid 3 replace BSON::ObjectId with Moped::BSON::ObjectId.

Now you can include this module in every Model, where you need created at.

#app/models/user.rb
class User
  include Mongoid::Document
  include Mongoid::CreatedAt
# ...
end
u = User.new(created_at: 1.hour.ago)
u.created_at

That's all easy enough, isn't it?