Book Image

Mongoose for Application Development

By : Simon Holmes
Book Image

Mongoose for Application Development

By: Simon Holmes

Overview of this book

Mongoose is all about putting the data model where it should be: in your application. You can control everything from within your application in JavaScript, eliminating the need to work with the database or a separate management system. Mongoose for Application Development is a practical, hands-on guide that takes you from installing the technology stack through the steps of developing a web application. It covers the key features of Mongoose and how to use them to rapidly develop a Node.js and MongoDB application. This book introduces the full technology stack of Node.js, MongoDB, Express, and Mongoose. It will take you through the process of building an application on this stack with a focus on how Mongoose makes the process quicker and easier. You will see how Mongoose removes a layer of complexity when dealing with MongoDB whilst giving you more control over your data from your application. You will learn how to define schemas and models for your data in JavaScript. Using these schemas and models, you will learn how to build the cornerstone of any web application that will include CRUD operations (creating, reading, updating, and deleting data). If you want to learn how to build applications quickly and efficiently using Node.js, then Mongoose and this book are ideal for you. Using practical examples throughout, Mongoose for Application Development not only teaches you about the concepts of Mongoose, but walks through how to use them to build a real-life application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mongoose for Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Reusable schema plugins


If we look at our schemas, we can see some common elements that we are repeating. For example, each of our schemas has an identical modifiedOn path, and our project and task schemas each have identical createdBy and createdOn paths.

If you're at all familiar with the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle of coding, you'll probably want to tidy these bits up and just declare them once. This is where the Mongoose plugin architecture comes in.

Creating a schema plugin

Let's start by creating a schema extension for adding createdOn and createdBy. Inside our model/db.js file, we can add the following code, preferably above the definitions for our two schemas:

var creationInfo = function creationInfo (schema, options) {
  schema.add({createdOn: { type: Date, default: Date.now }});
  schema.add({createdBy: { type: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'User', required: true}});
};

This exposes a function that will allow us to plug in the paths createdOn and createdBy, to some...