in my code people can follow other people. So far everything is ok apart from this fact: in the userScheme I have this field.
, following: [{ type: Schema.ObjectId, ref: 'Users' }]
Since every user has an username, it's more versatile for me to use dbref with the username. is there a way to do something like this?
, following: [{ type: Users.username, ref: 'Users' }]
Many thanks, g
You can only reference via ObjectId to a collection like your first code snippet.
[{ type: Schema.ObjectId, ref: 'Users' }]
When making a query with populate(), you can specify the fields you want to return. In your case, it woud look something like
User.find({}).populate('following', 'username').exec(function(err,doc) {});
Each object in the following array would look like
{ _id: 'xxxxxxxxxx', username: 'xxxxxxxx' }
No, only ObjectId values that refer to the _id property of another collection can be used as refs.
Confirmed in the source code.