How to build a conditional query in Mongoose?

Question

The following code works with no querystrings or one querystring only. In other words, simply going to /characters returns all

Answer 1

You don't need to call Query#where repeatedly, since you can pass all the conditions to Mongoose Model#find as:

var filteredQuery = {},
  acceptableFields = ['gender', 'race', /* etc */ ];

acceptableFields.forEach(function(field) {
  req.query[field] && filteredQuery[field] = req.query[field];
});

var query = Character.find(filteredQuery);

You'll also want to sanitize req.query depending on the allowed parameters you have in mind.