When using Spring Data to insert an Object, Spring Data will ALWAYS assign "_class" as the first field of the DBObject. This precludes the ability to insert a BSONTimestamp at the beginning of a DBObject to allow it to be populated server-side. The ability to assign a timestamp value server-side is critical to our application (because we have multiple clients running concurrently). The limitation of only looking at the first field (after "_id") prevents the ability to use Spring Data.