What will be the best practice to save family tree in mongodb via mongoose?

Question

I am using nodejs and mongoose and I want to save a family tree to mongoose. My question is for the schema. What will be better: to have a person schema in which there is an array field which stores the ids of the family members or there is some other way to do so. Because if I want to get a person with all his family members the machine must go through all the people and check them if they are family members of the person. Is there more efficient way?

Answer 1

What you can do :

Solution one is to have family model which have a id and in the user model I would have a field with the family id (if you don't think a family model is needed you can just have a field with a family name, but it will need to be unique for each family).

Exemple with family model:

var FamilySchema = new Schema({
  name: String
});

var family = db.model('family', FamilySchema);

var PersonSchema = new Schema({
 name : String,
 family : { type : Mongoose.Schema.ObjectId, ref : 'family' }
});

Simple exemple with family name as a string:

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

Plus if you put a index on the family field in the user model it would be really fast to retrieve all the family members of someone. Here is more about index in mongodb database : http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/indexes/

Solution two you can make use of a collection, family model containing all the family members.

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

var person = db.model('person', PersonSchema);

var FamilySchema = new Schema({
  name : String,

  members : [{ type : Mongoose.Schema.ObjectId, ref : 'person' }]
});