Why was mongoose designed in this way?

Question

I'm new to mongoose,
If I want to define a model, I could use the following:

var ArticleSchema = new Schema({
    _id: ObjectId,
    title: String,
    content: String,
    time: { type: Date, default: Date.now }
});
var ArticleModel = mongoose.model("Article", ArticleSchema);

But why not just code like this:

var ArticleModel = new Model({ 
    // properties
});

Why was mongoose designed in this way? Is there any situation where I can reuse "ArticleSchema"?

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 11 '12 at 19:07

It's designed that way so that you can define a schema for subdocuments, which do not map to distinct models. Keep in mind that a there is a one-to-one relation between collections and models.

From the Mongoose website:

var Comments = new Schema({
    title     : String
  , body      : String
  , date      : Date
});

var BlogPost = new Schema({
    author    : ObjectId
  , title     : String
  , body      : String
  , buf       : Buffer
  , date      : Date
  , comments  : [Comments]
  , meta      : {
      votes : Number
    , favs  : Number
  }
});

var Post = mongoose.model('BlogPost', BlogPost);

I got it. Thanks a lot. And I think design in this way could also make the schema reusable when there has different collections with the same schema. — Kevin, Apr 12 '12 at 07:55

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 11 '12 at 15:12

4

Yeah sometimes I split the Schema's up into separate files and do this kind of thing.

// db.js 
var ArticleSchema = require("./ArticleSchema");
mongoose.Model("Article", ArticleSchema);

It's only really useful when you have a bunch of static and other methods on models and the main model file gets messy.

answered Apr 11 '12 at 15:12

Jamund Ferguson

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If you did that: `var ArticleSchema = require("./ArticleSchema"); var Article1 = mongoose.Model("Article1", ArticleSchema); var Article2 = mongoose.Model("Article2", ArticleSchema);` How would you import/require those collections in another file?``` – morgs32 Jun 11 '14 at 20:32

Why was mongoose designed in this way?

2 Answers2