CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jsmongodbmongoose
K20GH
K20GH

Reputation: 6263

How do I reference ObjectID in another collection in MongoDB & Node?

I'm fairly new to this, so bear with me, however I have 2 collections. One called photos and another called users.

In Node, I am taking the data and putting it into my MongoDB using mongoose. I've got this working fine with my Schema:

var picSchema = new Schema({
        uid: String,
        pid: String,
        oFile: String
});

What I want to do though is for the uid, I want to add the ObjectId for the user uploading the photo. I can pass this as a String, however I thought that I would have had to have the field set as an ObjectId, but seems I cannot do this?

Unless I am missing something, I might as well just add the username in there and use that as a reference?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 13844

Answers (1)

snozza
snozza

Reputation: 2253

Use mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId to populate the field with an ObjectId. In this case, you would use User (or whatever the name of your User schema is).

var picSchema = new Schema({
            uid: {type: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'User'},
            pid: String,
            oFile: String
});

Further to this, you can also use the Mongoose method Populate if you wish to expand the User document within a Pic document. For example:

Pic.find({})
  .populate('uid')
  .exec(function(err, pic) {
    console.log(pic);
    // do something
});

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions