Create a conditional TTL in mongo

Question

There is a particular task I want to accomplish, but I am not finding any particular way to do that. Let\'s say I have an app that is used to send mails. I keep a record of thes

Answer 1

You can just create a TTL index on scheduledDate, if the value is zero it will not be deleted. According to the documentation, if the indexed field in a document is not a date or an array that holds a date value(s), the document will not expire.

Using Mongo 3.2 I have verified this is indeed the case using this test collection:

db.data.drop()
db.data.save({scheduledDate: 0})
db.data.save({scheduledDate: new Date()})
db.data.save({scheduledDate: new Date()})
db.data.createIndex( { "scheduledDate": 1 }, { expireAfterSeconds:1} )

When using this collection all new Date() entries get removed , whereas the first record with the zero value remains