I am fooling around with databases for the first time using mongoose.js, but I can't figure out something that to me seems like pretty basic functionality. I want to put a specific document one position up in the database, to update the order in which the documents are loaded when I fetch them all. I can't find some build-in method for this except for maybe .sort(), but that would mean I have to keep track of the indexes of each instance, change them accordingly when I want to change the order and then sort the database based on that new property, this seems like reinventing the wheel to me.
Am i simply overlooking some basic concept about databases and am I not supposed to do this? Or am I missing the function I'm looking for?
MongoDB doesn't provide any ability to explicitly modify the natural order of the documents in a collection and may move docs around in the collection as they are updated.
If you want your docs returned in a specific order, the docs must contain a field you can sort on to put them in that order. For the sort to be performant, you typically need to also create an index on that field.