Book Image

MEAN Cookbook

By : Nicholas McClay
Book Image

MEAN Cookbook

By: Nicholas McClay

Overview of this book

The MEAN Stack is a framework for web application development using JavaScript-based technologies; MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node.js. If you want to expand your understanding of using JavaScript to produce a fully functional standalone web application, including the web server, user interface, and database, then this book can help guide you through that transition. This book begins by configuring the frontend of the MEAN stack web application using the Angular JavaScript framework. We then implement common user interface enhancements before moving on to configuring the server layer of our MEAN stack web application using Express for our backend APIs. You will learn to configure the database layer of your MEAN stack web application using MongoDB and the Mongoose framework, including modeling relationships between documents. You will explore advanced topics such as optimizing your web application using WebPack as well as the use of automated testing with the Mocha and Chai frameworks. By the end of the book, you should have acquired a level of proficiency that allows you to confidently build a full production-ready and scalable MEAN stack application.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Creating relational documents in MongoDB with population

Having an objectId reference can be useful. However, we often want to return a whole model as if it were an embedded sub-document, but have it contain the updated data from the referenced document. This operation is possible using Mongoose's populate method. With populate, we can retrieve the additional document details required, similar to a JOIN operation in a relational database, and merge the result into the referencing document.

Getting ready

Let's update our /middleware/rest.js middleware to support Mongoose population for retrieving documents that contain embedded objectId references. We will be able to retrieve our full post details in our /api/users...