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

Population – references to other collections


MongoDB and Mongoose do not support JOIN commands as MongoDB is not a relational database. Mongoose gives you an elegant way to achieve similar functionality by using population.

Note

The concept of Population was dramatically expanded upon in Version 3.6 of Mongoose. Older versions won't support everything referenced in this chapter.

Population works by pulling information into the model you're currently using from a second model. Unlike JOIN statements, these are actually separate queries. First you retrieve your primary set of data from a collection, and once that is returned, you "populate" the required data from a secondary collection. We'll see this in some code very soon.

Defining data for population

The first step to setting up population is in the schema. Your primary schema links to the referenced model by passing an object containing the name of the model to be used and the SchemaType of the linked schema object.

In our application, there...