Command syntax

Description

Insert documents into a table. Accepts a single document or an array of documents.

The optional arguments are:

• durability: possible values are hard and soft. This option will override the table or query’s durability setting (set in run). In soft durability mode RethinkDB will acknowledge the write immediately after receiving and caching it, but before the write has been committed to disk.
• return_changes:
  • True: return a changes array consisting of old_val/new_val objects describing the changes made, only including the documents actually updated.
  • False: do not return a changes array (the default).
  • "always": behave as True, but include all documents the command tried to update whether or not the update was successful. (This was the behavior of True pre-2.0.)
• conflict: Determine handling of inserting documents with the same primary key as existing entries. There are three built-in methods: "error", "replace" or "update"; alternatively, you may provide a conflict resolution function.
  • "error": Do not insert the new document and record the conflict as an error. This is the default.
  • "replace": Replace the old document in its entirety with the new one.
  • "update": Update fields of the old document with fields from the new one.
  • lambda id, old_doc, newdoc: resolved_doc: a function that receives the id, old and new documents as arguments and returns a document which will be inserted in place of the conflicted one.
• ignore_write_hook: If True, and if the user has the config permission, ignores any write hook, inserting the document unmodified.

If return_changes is set to True or "always", the changes array will follow the same order as the inserted documents. Documents in changes for which an error occurs (such as a key conflict) will have a third field, error, with an explanation of the error.

Insert returns an object that contains the following attributes:

• inserted: the number of documents successfully inserted.
• replaced: the number of documents updated when conflict is set to "replace" or "update".
• unchanged: the number of documents whose fields are identical to existing documents with the same primary key when conflict is set to "replace" or "update".
• errors: the number of errors encountered while performing the insert.
• first_error: If errors were encountered, contains the text of the first error.
• deleted and skipped: 0 for an insert operation.
• generated_keys: a list of generated primary keys for inserted documents whose primary keys were not specified (capped to 100,000).
• warnings: if the field generated_keys is truncated, you will get the warning “Too many generated keys (<X>), array truncated to 100000.”.
• changes: if return_changes is set to True, this will be an array of objects, one for each objected affected by the insert operation. Each object will have two keys: {"new_val": <new value>, "old_val": None}.

Example: Insert a document into the table posts.

r.table("posts").insert({
    "id": 1,
    "title": "Lorem ipsum",
    "content": "Dolor sit amet"
}).run(conn)

The result will be:

{
    "deleted": 0,
    "errors": 0,
    "inserted": 1,
    "replaced": 0,
    "skipped": 0,
    "unchanged": 0
}

Example: Insert a document without a defined primary key into the table posts where the primary key is id.

r.table("posts").insert({
    "title": "Lorem ipsum",
    "content": "Dolor sit amet"
}).run(conn)

RethinkDB will generate a primary key and return it in generated_keys.

{
    "deleted": 0,
    "errors": 0,
    "generated_keys": [
        "dd782b64-70a7-43e4-b65e-dd14ae61d947"
    ],
    "inserted": 1,
    "replaced": 0,
    "skipped": 0,
    "unchanged": 0
}

Retrieve the document you just inserted with:

r.table("posts").get("dd782b64-70a7-43e4-b65e-dd14ae61d947").run(conn)

And you will get back:

{
    "id": "dd782b64-70a7-43e4-b65e-dd14ae61d947",
    "title": "Lorem ipsum",
    "content": "Dolor sit amet",
}

Example: Insert multiple documents into the table users.

r.table("users").insert([
    {"id": "william", "email": "william@rethinkdb.com"},
    {"id": "lara", "email": "lara@rethinkdb.com"}
]).run(conn)

Example: Insert a document into the table users, replacing the document if the document already exists.

r.table("users").insert(
    {"id": "william", "email": "william@rethinkdb.com"},
    conflict="replace"
).run(conn)

Example: Copy the documents from posts to posts_backup.

r.table("posts_backup").insert( r.table("posts") ).run(conn)

Example: Get back a copy of the inserted document (with its generated primary key).

r.table("posts").insert(
    {"title": "Lorem ipsum", "content": "Dolor sit amet"},
    return_changes=True
).run(conn)

The result will be

{
    "deleted": 0,
    "errors": 0,
    "generated_keys": [
        "dd782b64-70a7-43e4-b65e-dd14ae61d947"
    ],
    "inserted": 1,
    "replaced": 0,
    "skipped": 0,
    "unchanged": 0,
    "changes": [
        {
            "old_val": None,
            "new_val": {
                "id": "dd782b64-70a7-43e4-b65e-dd14ae61d947",
                "title": "Lorem ipsum",
                "content": "Dolor sit amet"
            }
        }
    ]
}

Example: Provide a resolution function that concatenates memo content in case of conflict.

# assume new_memos is a list of memo documents to insert
r.table('memos').insert(new_memos, conflict=
    lambda id, old_doc, new_doc: new_doc.merge({content: old_doc['content'] + "\n" + new_doc['content']})
).run(conn)