Node.js and JSON.stringify missing some values/parameters from object

Question

Maybe I don't understand javascript/coffee script as well as I thought but when I do this:

that.thing = thing
that.thing.title = "some title"
console.log(that.thing.title)
console.log(JSON.stringify(that.thing)

I get output:

some title

{"creation_date":"2011-09-09T00:40:03.742Z","_id":"4e6960638ec80519a0000013"}

The problem is I seem to lose the title property when I do the stringify (and later on when the function exists I seem to be having other interesting problems which I assume have to do with 'that' and this nested within multiple fxn calls).

(I had to do an ugly solution for now where I do that.thing = {} to solve my problem. Other problems I had to solve before included node.js + async + mongoose.find and this is all inside async.findEach)

When I do

console.log(that.thing.toJSON) 

I get:

function () { return this.toObject(); }

Thanks.

Answer 1

This is because Model.find() is returning a MongooseDocument. If you want a plain JavaScript object, which you can add properties to, you need to specify the "lean" option:

Model.find().lean().exec(function (err, thing) {
    thing.title = "some title";
    console.log(JSON.stringify(thing));
});

This will work fine, provided you don't need to save the thing object again (as this is not a MongooseDocument, no getters and setters are applied).