Update a specific field only if it exists in MongoDB

Question

DB Schema

{
  "_id": "365e4101-9dda-4f21-8e8b-4bc301afcdf2",
  "isDeleted": false,
  "user": {
    "timestamp": "2023-03-04",
    "name": "test",
    "surname": "password",
    "email": "test.password@gmail.com",
  },
  "postings": [
    {
      "id": "eeb79bd8-ba20-41b5-a3fd-6377f86236fd",
      "isDeleted": false,
      "images": [
        {
          "id": "ea2209e5-63d7-47ab-8d02-60ffb67d86ca",
          "timestamp": "2023-03-18T13:59:15.630123",
          "isDeleted": false
        },
        {
          "id": "8248b0ab-968b-4109-8ebd-f7c6968051e0",
          "timestamp": "2023-03-18T13:59:17.414993",
          "isDeleted": false
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "96c04919-b5c3-4442-a593-a05e661a5ebd",
      "isDeleted": false
    },
  ]
}

Purpose

As can be seen from the schema, in the array postings, each element can have a property called images. Some elements have it, and some don't, what I am trying to do is set the fields:

postings.isDeleted = true // for a post specified by a post ID
postings.images.isDeleted = true // for every image in that post

Current Approach

update_result = await dbConnection.find_one_and_update(
        {"postings.id": id},
        [{
            "$set": {
                "postings.$[p].isDeleted": True,
                "postings.$[p].images.$[].isDeleted" : True 
                // I need a condition above to check if the field _images_ exists in the post
               // and update it if it exists, but do nothing if it does not exist
            }
        }],
        upsert=True,
        array_filters=[
            {
                "p.id": id,
                "p.isDeleted": False
            }]
    )

Current Behavior

It works fine for documents that have the images array and it deletes it correctly. But it crashes if I attempt to update the images field if it does not exist, which is logical.

Example 1

If the supplied post ID is eeb79bd8-ba20-41b5-a3fd-6377f86236fd, this is the current result:

{
      "id": "eeb79bd8-ba20-41b5-a3fd-6377f86236fd", // <- post ID
      "isDeleted": true, // <- change here
      "images": [
        {
          "id": "ea2209e5-63d7-47ab-8d02-60ffb67d86ca",
          "timestamp": "2023-03-18T13:59:15.630123",
          "isDeleted": true // <- change here
        },
        {
          "id": "8248b0ab-968b-4109-8ebd-f7c6968051e0",
          "timestamp": "2023-03-18T13:59:17.414993",
          "isDeleted": true // <- change here
        }
      ]
    }

Example 2

When the postID is 96c04919-b5c3-4442-a593-a05e661a5ebd, it crashes with the following error message:

pymongo.errors.OperationFailure: Plan executor error during findAndModify :: caused by :: The path 'postings.2.images' must exist in the document in order to apply array updates., full error: {'ok': 0.0, 'errmsg': "Plan executor error during findAndModify :: caused by :: The path 'postings.2.images' must exist in the document in order to apply array updates."

Desired Behavior

I would like to modify the above query such that:

It sets postings.isDeleted = True for the specified post, this is already working
It sets postings.images.isDeleted = True if the images array exists in the specified post