How to do migration & seed with MongoDB.Driver on Asp.Net Core?

Question

We are building an Asp.Net core web API that must use MongoDb on the backend. According to what I found, it is recommended to use directly MongoDb.Driver because it does already most of the job and it makes less sense to use an ORM(EF Core) with a NoSql DB.

One thing that I'm not sure:

Is there a way to make "migration" as we would with Entity Framework? Same thing for the data seeding? I could imagine some way to doing it myself, but it feels like re-inventing the wheel.

So, how should we handle the potentials data migrations?

Ps, I understand that if we just add a property, we might not do an update, but there might be some occasion where you have a real structure changes

Answer 1

Some of the changes can be handled without explicit migrations; for some examples, see this link.

For others, we executed some code at startup that created indexes, set up collections or performed migrations. In the best case, this code is idempotent, so that it can be run multiple times. Otherwise we stored a migration marker in the database so that only the necessary migrations are run and parallel executions of the code are avoided.

If you need a more sophisticated approach with documents storing their version and the option to perform an on-the-fly-migration on a per-document-basis, you could check out this package.

Up to now, it was sufficient for us to perform the migrations at startup so that we haven't used this package yet.