Validate subdocuments in Mongoose

Question

Validate subdocuments in Mongoose

I am using a Schema as a Subdocument in Mongoose, but I am not able to validate it in its fields.
That's what I have

var SubdocumentSchema = new Schema({
    foo: {
        type: String,
        trim: true,
        required: true
    },
    bar: {
        type: String,
        trim: true,
        required: true
    }
});

var MainDocumentSchema = new Schema({
  name: {
    type: String,
    trim: true,
    required: true
  },
  children: {
    type : [ SubdocumentSchema.schema ],
    validate: arrayFieldsCannotBeBlankValidation
  }
});

I want to be sure that every field of the subdocument is not empty.
I found out that this is not possible to validate an Array with standard methods, so I wrote my custom validation function. By now I have to manually check that all the fields are correct and not empty, but it looks to me like a not really scalable solution, so I was wondering if there was some native method to trigger the Subdocument validation from the MainDocument one.

node.js
mongodb
validation
mongoose

Answer 1

In the definition of children, it should be [SubdocumentSchema], not [SubdocumentSchema.schema]:

var MainDocumentSchema = new Schema({
  name: {
    type: String,
    trim: true,
    required: true
  },
  children: {
    type : [ SubdocumentSchema ],
    validate: arrayFieldsCannotBeBlankValidation
  }
});

SubdocumentSchema.schema evaluates to undefined so in your current code Mongoose doesn't have the necessary type information to validate the elements of children.