Auto increment in MongoDB to store sequence of Unique User ID

I know this is an old question, but I shall post my answer for posterity...

It depends on the system that you are building and the particular business rules in place.

I am building a moderate to large scale CRM in MongoDb, C# (Backend API), and Angular (Frontend web app) and found ObjectId utterly terrible for use in Angular Routing for selecting particular entities. Same with API Controller routing.

The suggestion above worked perfectly for my project.

db.contacts.insert({
 "id":db.contacts.find().Count()+1,
 "name":"John Doe",
 "emails":[
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]"
 ],
 "phone":"555111322",
 "status":"Active"
});

The reason it is perfect for my case, but not all cases is that as the above comment states, if you delete 3 records from the collection, you will get collisions.

My business rules state that due to our in house SLA's, we are not allowed to delete correspondence data or clients records for longer than the potential lifespan of the application I'm writing, and therefor, I simply mark records with an enum "Status" which is either "Active" or "Deleted". You can delete something from the UI, and it will say "Contact has been deleted" but all the application has done is change the status of the contact to "Deleted" and when the app calls the respository for a list of contacts, I filter out deleted records before pushing the data to the client app.

Therefore, db.collection.find().count() + 1 is a perfect solution for me...

It won't work for everyone, but if you will not be deleting data, it works fine.

Edit

latest versions of pymongo:

db.contacts.count() + 1

As selected answer says you can use findAndModify to generate sequential IDs.

But I strongly disagree with opinion that you should not do that. It all depends on your business needs. Having 12-byte ID may be very resource consuming and cause significant scalability issues in future.

I have detailed answer here.

You can, but you should not https://web.archive.org/web/20151009224806/http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/create-an-auto-incrementing-field/

Each object in mongo already has an id, and they are sortable in insertion order. What is wrong with getting collection of user objects, iterating over it and use this as incremented ID? Er go for kind of map-reduce job entirely