BSON parser

BSON is short for Bin­ary JSON and is the bin­ary-en­coded seri­al­iz­a­tion of JSON-like doc­u­ments. You can learn more about it in the specification.

This browser version of the BSON parser is compiled using rollup and the current version is pre-compiled in the dist directory.

This is the default BSON parser, however, there is a C++ Node.js addon version as well that does not support the browser. It can be found at mongod-js/bson-ext.

Usage

To build a new version perform the following operations:

npm install
npm run build

A simple example of how to use BSON in the browser:

<script src="./dist/bson.js"></script>

<script>
  function start() {
    // Get the Long type
    const Long = BSON.Long;

    // Serialize document
    const doc = { long: Long.fromNumber(100) }

    // Serialize a document
    const data = BSON.serialize(doc)
    // De serialize it again
    const doc_2 = BSON.deserialize(data)
  }
</script>

A simple example of how to use BSON in Node.js:

const BSON = require('bson');
const Long = BSON.Long;

const doc = { long: Long.fromNumber(100) };

// Serialize a document
const data = BSON.serialize(doc);
console.log('data:', data);

// Deserialize the resulting Buffer
const doc_2 = BSON.deserialize(data);
console.log('doc_2:', doc_2);

Installation

npm install bson

Documentation

Functions

setInternalBufferSize(size)

Sets the size of the internal serialization buffer.

serialize(object) ⇒ Buffer

Serialize a Javascript object.

serializeWithBufferAndIndex(object, buffer) ⇒ Number

Serialize a Javascript object using a predefined Buffer and index into the buffer, useful when pre-allocating the space for serialization.

deserialize(buffer) ⇒ Object

Deserialize data as BSON.

calculateObjectSize(object) ⇒ Number

Calculate the bson size for a passed in Javascript object.

deserializeStream(data, startIndex, numberOfDocuments, documents, docStartIndex, [options]) ⇒ Number

Deserialize stream data as BSON documents.

setInternalBufferSize(size)

Sets the size of the internal serialization buffer.

serialize(object)

Serialize a Javascript object.

Returns: Buffer - returns the Buffer object containing the serialized object.

serializeWithBufferAndIndex(object, buffer)

Serialize a Javascript object using a predefined Buffer and index into the buffer, useful when pre-allocating the space for serialization.

Returns: Number - returns the index pointing to the last written byte in the buffer.

deserialize(buffer)

Deserialize data as BSON.

Returns: Object - returns the deserialized Javascript Object.

calculateObjectSize(object)

Calculate the bson size for a passed in Javascript object.

Returns: Number - returns the number of bytes the BSON object will take up.

deserializeStream(data, startIndex, numberOfDocuments, documents, docStartIndex, [options])

Deserialize stream data as BSON documents.

Returns: Number - returns the next index in the buffer after deserialization x numbers of documents.

FAQ

Why does undefined get converted to null?

The undefined BSON type has been deprecated for many years, so this library has dropped support for it. Use the ignoreUndefined option (for example, from the driver ) to instead remove undefined keys.

How do I add custom serialization logic?

This library looks for toBSON() functions on every path, and calls the toBSON() function to get the value to serialize.

const BSON = require('bson');

class CustomSerialize {
  toBSON() {
    return 42;
  }
}

const obj = { answer: new CustomSerialize() };
// "{ answer: 42 }"
console.log(BSON.deserialize(BSON.serialize(obj)));