Mongoose: multiple query populate in a single call
JavascriptMongooseJavascript Problem Overview
In Mongoose, I can use a query populate to populate additional fields after a query. I can also populate multiple paths, such as
Person.find({})
.populate('books movie', 'title pages director')
.exec()
However, this would generate a lookup on book gathering the fields for title, pages and director - and also a lookup on movie gathering the fields for title, pages and director as well. What I want is to get title and pages from books only, and director from movie. I could do something like this:
Person.find({})
.populate('books', 'title pages')
.populate('movie', 'director')
.exec()
which gives me the expected result and queries.
But is there any way to have the behavior of the second snippet using a similar "single line" syntax like the first snippet? The reason for that, is that I want to programmatically determine the arguments for the populate function and feed it in. I cannot do that for multiple populate calls.
Javascript Solutions
Solution 1 - Javascript
After looking into the sourcecode of mongoose, I solved this with:
var populateQuery = [{path:'books', select:'title pages'}, {path:'movie', select:'director'}];
Person.find({})
.populate(populateQuery)
.execPopulate()
Solution 2 - Javascript
you can also do something like below:
{path:'user',select:['key1','key2']}
Solution 3 - Javascript
You achieve that by simply passing object or array of objects to populate() method.
const query = [
{
path:'books',
select:'title pages'
},
{
path:'movie',
select:'director'
}
];
const result = await Person.find().populate(query).lean();
Consider that lean() method is optional, it just returns raw json rather than mongoose object and makes code execution a little bit faster! Don't forget to make your function (callback) async!
Solution 4 - Javascript
This is how it's done based on the Mongoose JS documentation http://mongoosejs.com/docs/populate.html
Let's say you have a BookCollection schema which contains users and books In order to perform a query and get all the BookCollections with its related users and books you would do this
models.BookCollection
.find({})
.populate('user')
.populate('books')
.lean()
.exec(function (err, bookcollection) {
if (err) return console.error(err);
try {
mongoose.connection.close();
res.render('viewbookcollection', { content: bookcollection});
} catch (e) {
console.log("errror getting bookcollection"+e);
}