Once a document is stored in a RethinkDB table, it can be changed using the update() command. This command accepts a JSON document or ReQL expression as input and returns the number of updated documents.
Updating a document can alter one or more attributes already present within the document itself, or can add a new attribute. Let's pretend we made a mistake inserting Amy's year of birth and we want to change the value from 1998 to 1997; we can update the related document using the following query:
r.table('people').get('f1664276-1aad-4998-8240-410a82883115').update({"yearOfBirth": 1997})First, we get the correct document using its primary key. Then we call the update() command, passing it a JSON document that contains the changes. In this case, the change is as follows:
({"yearOfBirth": 1997}If we now query the database searching for Amy's document, we can see that year of birth has, in fact, been updated correctly:
