Population

Population

There are no joins in MongoDB but sometimes we still want references to documents in other collections. This is where population comes in.

Population is the process of automatically replacing the specified paths in the document with document(s) from other collection(s). We may populate a single document, multiple documents, plain object, multiple plain objects, or all objects returned from a query. Let's look at some examples.

var mongoose = require('mongoose')
  , Schema = mongoose.Schema
  
var personSchema = Schema({
  _id     : Number,
  name    : String,
  age     : Number,
  stories : [{ type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Story' }]
});

var storySchema = Schema({
  _creator : { type: Number, ref: 'Person' },
  title    : String,
  f