Derick Rethans has posted the next part of his series looking at the new an improved MongoDB drivers for PHP in this post to his site. This time he focuses on the updates to cursor behavior from the previous versions.

We released a new version of the MongoDB driver for PHP (the mongodb extension) near the end of last year. In a previous blog post, I covered the back story of the how and why we undertook this effort. And in another post, I spoke about the architecture of the new driver. In this episode I will discuss changes in cursor behaviour.

I recently found the following comment added to the driver's documentation, on PHP.net, which read: "I noticed that ->sort is missing from the cursor. Seems like the old driver has more functionality."

The new driver certainly allows for sorting of results of queries, but no longer by calling the sort() method on the cursor object. This is because cursors are now created differently than in the old mongo extension.

He starts by talking about how the legacy driver handled its cursor functionality and when it actually performed the data lookup (hint: not until used). In the newer drivers the cursor request is made when the object is created. Because of this change, actions like "sort" and "skip" have to be sent as options on the query instead.