How to manually create a DBRef using pymongo?

Question

I want to create a DBRef manually so that I can add an additional field to it. However, when I try to pass the following:

{'$ref': 'projects', '$id': '1029412409721', 'project_name': 'My Project'}

Pymongo raises an error:

pymongo.errors.InvalidName: key '$id' must not start with '$'

It would seem that pymongo reserve the $ for the special key, leading me to wonder if it is even possible to do what I'm trying to do?

Answer 1

Probably don't want to be creating them manually like that, since keys in DBRefs need to be ordered. We could add an option to create a DBRef instance w/ custom kwargs though, which would solve your problem. If you file a jira for this we should be able to get it out in an upcoming release.