Manufacturing a MongoDB ObjectId for the past

MongoDB’s ObjectId() has some nice sequential properties. One of the interesting ones is the fact that the most significant 4 bytes are a timestamp with seconds granularity.

Suppose you want to query your collection for items created on or after a certain date. Since the timestamp portion can be constructed (milliseconds since epoch), and the rest can be manufactured (zero would be fine) we can now write a function to generate what the ObjectId would be or be just higher or lower than:

var past =  new Date((new Date()).getTime() - (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000));
var stamp = ObjectId(Math.floor(past.getTime() / 1000).toString(16) + "0000000000000000");

The stamp object contains an ObjectId with a value representing the floor value of any object ids generated 90 days ago to the seconds granularity. Using the stamp value, we can then write a query for objects created on or after that time.

While this value may not be suitable for exact reporting (as the rounding may exclude or include some values because of the lack of granularity) it is well suited to finding records inserted at or around that time, such as retiring older records etc.