Mongoose: CastError: Cast to ObjectId failed for value “[object Object]” at path “_id”

Question

I am new to node.js, so I have a feeling that this will be something silly that I have overlooked, but I haven\'t been able to find an answer that fixes my problem. What I\'

Answer 1

For the record: I had this error trying to fill a subdocument in a wrong way:

{
[CastError: Cast to ObjectId failed for value "[object Object]" at path "_id"]
message: 'Cast to ObjectId failed for value "[object Object]" at path "_id"',
name: 'CastError',
type: 'ObjectId',
path: '_id'
value:
  [ { timestamp: '2014-07-03T00:23:45-04:00',
  date_start: '2014-07-03T00:23:45-04:00',
  date_end: '2014-07-03T00:23:45-04:00',
  operation: 'Deactivation' } ],
}

look ^ value is an array containing an object: wrong!

Explanation: I was sending data from php to a node.js API in this way:

$history = json_encode(
array(
  array(
  'timestamp'  => date('c', time()),
  'date_start' => date('c', time()),
  'date_end'   => date('c', time()),
  'operation'  => 'Deactivation'
)));

As you can see $history is an array containing an array. That's why mongoose try to fill _id (or any other field) with an array instead than a Scheme.ObjectId (or any other data type). The following works:

$history = json_encode(
array(
  'timestamp'  => date('c', time()),
  'date_start' => date('c', time()),
  'date_end'   => date('c', time()),
  'operation'  => 'Deactivation'
));