You could use an EventEmitter to trigger the background task.
Or you can trigger an asynchronous task before you return the response.
I would implement some kind of simple in-memory queue. Before returning the response I would add a task to the queue, emit an event telling listeners there is task in the queue.
Edit:
I'm not sure if I understand your use case exactly. But this might be one approach.
If you do not have reference to do the mongo you might have to do some fast lookup or creation, then return the response, then run the task
const myqueue = []
const eventHandler = new EventEmitter();
eventHandler.on('performBackgroundTask', () => {
myqueue.forEach(task => {
// perform task
})
})
app.get('/api', function (req, res) {
const identificationForItemInMongo = 123
myqueue.push(identificationForItemInMongo)
eventHandler.emit('performBackgroundTask', identificationForItemInMongo)
res.send('Send the response')
})