Mongoose document references with a one-to-many relationship

Question

I'm working on designing a database structure for a new project, and I'm pretty new to MongoDB, and obviously Mongoose.

I've read Mongooses population documentation, where it has a one-to-many relationship, with one Person document to many Story documents, but the part that confuses me is where instead of the Story documents referencing what Person document it belongs to, the Person schema has it setup so it has an array of what Story documents it 'owns'.

I'm setting up something very similar to this. But I keep thinking it would be easier when creating new Story documents to have the Person document ID. But maybe thats just because I'm more familiar with MySQL relationships using joins.

If this is the best way to do it (and I'm sure it is, since its in the docs), when new Story documents are created, whats the best way to update the array of stories in the associated People document it belongs to? I looked but couldn't find any examples of updating existing documents to add references to other documents (or deleting them for that matter)

I'm sure this is an easy solution that I just overlooked or something, but any help would be great. Thanks!

Answer 1

Refer to population, here extract an example from Mongoose.

var mongoose = require('mongoose')
, Schema = mongoose.Schema

var personSchema = Schema({
  _id     : Schema.Types.ObjectId,
  name    : String,
  age     : Number,
  stories : [{ type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Story' }]
});

var storySchema = Schema({
  _creator : { type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Person' },
  title    : String,
  fans     : [{ type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Person' }]
});

var Story  = mongoose.model('Story', storySchema);
var Person = mongoose.model('Person', personSchema);

So the example about, Story model stores related Person._id in Story._creator. When you find a document of Story, you can use populate() method to define which attribute in Person model you want to retrieve at the same time, such as:

Story.findOne({_id: 'xxxxxxx'}).populate('person', 'name age').exec(function(err, story) {
  console.log('Story title: ', story.title);
  console.log('Story creator', story.person.name);
});

I believe this is what you looking for. Or else, you can use nested collections instead.