Mongoose: remove() returns true for already deleted items

Question

my code below returns "User deleted" even if the user was already deleted. I'd prefer to throw a 404 in this case, but I'd like to query the DB as less as possible.

Is there a way to get the userNotFound (see below) without manually checking if the user existed before deletion? Maybe I missed a feature of remove() or an alternative function.

var itemId = 123;
Item.remove({id: itemId}, function(err) {
    if (err) {
        return res.json({success: false, msg: 'Cannot remove item'});
    }

    // !!!
    if (userNotFound) {
        return res.status(404).json({success: false, msg: 'User not found'});
    }  
    // /!!!


    res.json({success: true, msg: 'User deleted.'});
});

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The problem with the above approach is that userNotFound will always be undefined since you haven't defined it in the callback arguments. Better to use the findOneAndRemove() function so that you can return the document removed if found:

var itemId = 123;
Item.findOneAndRemove({ id: itemId }) 
    .exec(function(err, item) {
        if (err) {
            return res.json({success: false, msg: 'Cannot remove item'});
        }       
        if (!item) {
            return res.status(404).json({success: false, msg: 'User not found'});
        }  
        res.json({success: true, msg: 'User deleted.'});
    });