Mongoose: Populating without ref in parent

Question

Mongoose: Populating without ref in parent

In my node.js + mongoose application I have a parent and a child schema which have the refs of each other:

var PersonSchema = new Schema({
    name    : String
  , age     : Number
  , stories : [{ type: Schema.ObjectId, ref: 'Story' }]
});

var StorySchema = new Schema({
    _creator : { type: Schema.ObjectId, ref: 'Person' }
  , title    : String
  , fans     : [{ type: Schema.ObjectId, ref: 'Person' }]
});

Now I am able to populate all stories when fetching a person by:

Person.findOne({ name: "some name"}).populate('stories').exec(...);

Recently I recognized that a growing array like stories in person slows down the performance for huge arrays. So I want to change that, because in my case the array is growing really fast and gets huge. My solution appeared to be easy. I changed the person schema to

var PersonSchema = new Schema({
    name    : String
  , age     : Number
});

that only the StorySchema holds the ref.

Now the question: Is there a way or workaround to populate even so the stories in my person?

node.js
mongodb
mongoose

Answer 1

You can always do:

var Script = mongoose.model('Script');  
Person.findOne({ name: "some name" }, function(err, person) {
    Script.find({ _creator: person._id }, function(err, scripts) {
        person.scripts = scripts;
        ...
    })
})

Hope that might helped.