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Referencing another schema in Mongoose

People also ask

Can you have a schema within a schema?

Subdocuments are documents embedded in other documents. In Mongoose, this means you can nest schemas in other schemas. Mongoose has two distinct notions of subdocuments: arrays of subdocuments and single nested subdocuments.

Can you change a mongoose schema?

There's nothing built into Mongoose regarding migrating existing documents to comply with a schema change. You need to do that in your own code, as needed.

What is ref schema?

ref basically means that mongoose would store the ObjectId values and when you call populate using those ObjectIds would fetch and fill the documents for you. So in this case: stories: [{ type: Schema.


It sounds like the populate method is what your looking for. First make small change to your post schema:

var postSchema = new Schema({
    name: String,
    postedBy: {type: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'User'},
    dateCreated: Date,
    comments: [{body:"string", by: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId}],
});

Then make your model:

var Post = mongoose.model('Post', postSchema);

Then, when you make your query, you can populate references like this:

Post.findOne({_id: 123})
.populate('postedBy')
.exec(function(err, post) {
    // do stuff with post
});

Addendum: No one mentioned "Populate" --- it is very much worth your time and money looking at Mongooses Populate Method : Also explains cross documents referencing

http://mongoosejs.com/docs/populate.html


Late reply, but adding that Mongoose also has the concept of Subdocuments

With this syntax, you should be able to reference your userSchema as a type in your postSchema like so:

var userSchema = new Schema({
    twittername: String,
    twitterID: Number,
    displayName: String,
    profilePic: String,
});

var postSchema = new Schema({
    name: String,
    postedBy: userSchema,
    dateCreated: Date,
    comments: [{body:"string", by: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId}],
});

Note the updated postedBy field with type userSchema.

This will embed the user object within the post, saving an extra lookup required by using a reference. Sometimes this could be preferable, other times the ref/populate route might be the way to go. Depends on what your application is doing.