PYTHON-1063 - Add an example doc for tailable cursors

behackett · behackett · commit b227f07cf0f1 · 2016-03-08T17:46:23.000-08:00
diff --git a/doc/examples/index.rst b/doc/examples/index.rst
@@ -27,4 +27,5 @@ MongoDB, you can start it like so:
    gridfs
    high_availability
    mod_wsgi
+   tailable
    tls
diff --git a/doc/examples/tailable.rst b/doc/examples/tailable.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+Tailable Cursors
+================
+
+By default, MongoDB will automatically close a cursor when the client has
+exhausted all results in the cursor. However, for `capped collections
+<https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/capped-collections/>`_ you may
+use a `tailable cursor
+<https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/glossary/#term-tailable-cursor>`_
+that remains open after the client exhausts the results in the initial cursor.
+
+The following is a basic example of using a tailable cursor to tail the oplog
+of a replica set member::
+
+  import time
+
+  import pymongo
+
+  client = pymongo.MongoClient()
+  oplog = client.local.oplog.rs
+  first = oplog.find().sort('$natural', pymongo.ASCENDING).limit(-1).next()
+  print(first)
+  ts = first['ts']
+
+  while True:
+      # For a regular capped collection CursorType.TAILABLE_AWAIT is the
+      # only option required to create a tailable cursor. When querying the
+      # oplog the oplog_replay option enables an optimization to quickly
+      # find the 'ts' value we're looking for. The oplog_replay option
+      # can only be used when querying the oplog.
+      cursor = oplog.find({'ts': {'$gt': ts}},
+                          cursor_type=pymongo.CursorType.TAILABLE_AWAIT,
+                          oplog_replay=True)
+      while cursor.alive:
+          for doc in cursor:
+              ts = doc['ts']
+              print(doc)
+          # We end up here if the find() returned no documents or if the
+          # tailable cursor timed out (no new documents were added to the
+          # collection for more than 1 second).
+          time.sleep(1)
+
