Mongoose: deep population (populate a populated field)

Question

I have Category model:

Category:
    ...
    articles: [{type:ObjectId, ref:\'Article\'}]

Article model contains ref to

Answer 1

Sorry to burst your bubble, but there's not a directly supported solution to this. As for Github issue #601, it looks grim. According to the 3.6 release notes, it looks like the developers acknowledged the issue are happy with manual recursive/deep population.

So from the release notes, the recommended method is to nest populated calls in the callback, so in your exec() function, use categories.populate to further populate before sending a response.