Referencing another schema in Mongoose

Question

if I have two schemas like:

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

var  User = mongoose.model('User') 

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

I tried to connect them together like the example above but I couldn't figure out how to do it. Eventually, if I can do something like this it would make my life very easy

var profilePic = Post.postedBy.profilePic

Answer 1

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
});