Shift8 Creative Graphic Design and Website Development

As I was pointed out today in the wonderful #li3 channel, MongoDB has an $inc operator, awesome! One I didn't see before (there are oh so many handy ones). So how do you write this in Lithium land? Well because we like being efficient and all, let's also look at how to do this without first reading the record (ie. an "update()" call).

Model::update(
// query
array(
  '$inc' => array(
    'field_name' => 1
  )
), 
// conditions
array(
  '_id' => $id
), 
// last but not least
array(
  'atomic' => false
)
);

There you have it. To decrement you'd put -1. Now also note that in my case (and it's worth mentioning) the value I had to increment was within an array actually. To get at that field you can simply use dot syntax to jump down into it. So the query would be more like:

array(
  '$inc' => array(
    'field_name.value_within' => 1
  )
)

Putting it altogether you can in pretty much one line, one call, very nicely increment or decrement values. Since MongoDB is so wonderful this gives you a very easy way to keep say a real time hit count or something for content within your Lithium application.