I'm building a Mongoose schema for a dating app.
I want each person document to contain a reference to all the events they've been to, where events is another schema with its own models in the system. How can I describe this in the schema?
var personSchema = mongoose.Schema({ firstname: String, lastname: String, email: String, gender: {type: String, enum: ["Male", "Female"]} dob: Date, city: String, interests: [interestsSchema], eventsAttended: ??? }); You can describe it by using Population
Population is the process of automatically replacing the specified paths in the document with document(s) from other collection(s). We may populate a single document, multiple documents, plain object, multiple plain objects, or all objects returned from a query.
Suppose your Event Schema is defined as follows:
var mongoose = require('mongoose') , Schema = mongoose.Schema var eventSchema = Schema({ title : String, location : String, startDate : Date, endDate : Date }); var personSchema = Schema({ firstname: String, lastname: String, email: String, gender: {type: String, enum: ["Male", "Female"]} dob: Date, city: String, interests: [interestsSchema], eventsAttended: [{ type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Event' }] }); var Event = mongoose.model('Event', eventSchema); var Person = mongoose.model('Person', personSchema); To show how populate is used, first create a person object, aaron = new Person({firstname: 'Aaron'}) and an event object, event1 = new Event({title: 'Hackathon', location: 'foo'}):
aaron.eventsAttended.push(event1); aaron.save(callback); Then, when you make your query, you can populate references like this:
Person .findOne({ firstname: 'Aaron' }) .populate('eventsAttended') // only works if we pushed refs to person.eventsAttended .exec(function(err, person) { if (err) return handleError(err); console.log(person); });