Handling timeouts with Node.js and mongodb

Handling timeouts with Node.js and mongodb

I am currently testing how some code stands up against the following
scenario:
Node.js application is started and successfully establishes a connection
to mongodb
After it has successfully setup a connection, the mongodb server dies and
all subsequent requests fail
To do this I have got the following code which makes use of the official
driver (found here: https://github.com/mongodb/node-mongodb-native) :
MongoClient.connect('mongodb://localhost:27017/testdb', function(err, db) {
app.get('/test', function(req, res) {
db.collection('users', function (err, collection) {
console.log(err);
if (err) {
// ## POINT 1 ##
// Handle the error
}
else {
collection.find({ 'username': username }, { timeout: true
}).toArray(function(err, items) {
console.log(err);
if (err) {
// ## POINT 2 ##
// Handle the error
}
else {
if (items.length > 0) {
// Do some stuff with the document that was found
}
else {
// Handle not finding the document
}
}
});
}
});
});
});
As the mongodb server is no longer running when the request is being
handled, I'd made the assumption that at either the points which I have
labelled ## POINT 1 ## or ## POINT 2 ##, it would return an error
indicating a timeout; this however, isn't the case.
I have tried a number of different settings (including one you can see
here that explicitly allows the cursor to timeout), however I cannot seem
to enable it in any way. In every configuration I've tried Node.js will
simply keep waiting for the find() operation to callback and it never
does.
If I start the Node.js application before running mongodb, it catches the
error in the connect callback fine, but if the connection dies after that
it doesn't seem to handle it in any way.
Is there a setting I am missing or is there no way to detect connections
being terminated after they've been established?