I’m doing some work for a client at the moment that involves storing files on disk and metadata about those files in a MongoDB instance. The service that manages all this needs to support replication between multiple so that as a file or metadata record gets added/deleted/updated etc., the same changes are applied to all other services that the first on is replicated with. All fairly simple, and quite a normal use case.
As part of my extensive automated testing I needed to be able to compare the resulting metadata after the replication to ensure that nothing is being missed. After a quick look round I couldn’t find anything to help with this, so I decided to write my own at home and open source it.
It’s now on my GitHub page, and on Nuget:
PM> Install-Package JimBobBennett.MongoDbCompare
It’s a simple tool designed to be called from .Net code to compare 2 collections that are based off a known .Net type. You create the class using the type as the generic argument, passing in the connection details to the two MongoDB instances to compare. You then call CompareAsync passing in a function that returns the unique id for each document so that it can marry up the collections and see if they match.
The comparison is done by using a simple Equals on each property in each document. Properties marked as BsonIgnore are ignored, as are properties marked as BsonId. You can also provide a list of names for properties that are also ignored (for example I’m using it to ignore a LastAccessed property that stores when the document was last accessed, which is different for each MongoDB instance).
The results that come back provide a list of documents that are only in the first collection, a list of documents that are only in the second, and a list of documents that are different. At the moment it doesn’t say which properties are different, but I’ll hopefully be making a change to include this in a later release.
This is not PCL unfortunately, because the MongoDB drivers are not PCL compliant, an only supports .Net 4.5.
Hope it’s helpful for someone. Feel free to raise a PR for anything else you want it to support.