I understand how to embed documents in Mongoose, and they seem fairly straightforward if storing as arrays, for which the use case is fairly obvious:
var CommentSchema = new Mongoose.Schema({...});
var BlogPostSchema = new Mongoose.Schema({
comments : [CommentSchema],
});
But, what I don't see how to do after looking over the documentation forward and backward, is how to store a single sub-document that doesn't need or want to be in an Array.
var UserSchema = new Mongoose.Schema({...});
var BlogPostSchema = new Mongoose.Schema({
author: ??? // 'UserSchema' and UserSchema do not work here.
});
Is there any way to make this work? I don't want to just store the ObjectId, but rather, store a complete copy of the User record, but don't need or want an array.
You cannot embed schemas in this way, with the reasoning that those child docs would be confused with full documents, see this bug thread, where it is stated:
the reason we haven't added this support in the past is b/c this leaves us wondering if all pre-hooks will be executed the same way for the pseudo-child document as well as it implies that we can call save() on that child.
The answer here is to share not the schema, but just the definition.
var userdef = { name: String };
var UserSchema = new Schema(userdef);
var BlogPostSchema = new Schema({author: userdef});
This would result in a nested user object, without actually nesting the Schema.
Just sharing information doesn't support validation bubbling. And you may need validation of UserSchema also.
Instead I recommend array length validation
author: {type:[UserSchema], validate: function (arr) { return arr.length == 1 }},
UPDATE:
In case anyone comes across this now, as of Mongoose 4.2.0 single embedded subdocuments exist! :)
http://mongoosejs.com/docs/subdocs.html#single-embedded