How to pass an optional argument in Mongoose/MongoDb - node.js

Question

I have the following query:
Documents.find({
$and: [
{
user_id: {$nin:
myUserId
}
},
{ date: { $gte: dateMax, $lt: dateMin } },
{documentTags: {$all: tags}}
],
})
What I'm trying to do is make the documentTags portion of the query optional. I have tried building the query as follows:
let tags = " ";
if (req.body.tags) {
tags = {videoTags: {$all: req.body.tags}};
}
let query = {
$and: [
{
user_id: {$nin:
myUserId
}
},
{ date: { $gte: dateMax, $lt: dateMin } },
tags
],
}
and then Document.find(query). The problem is no matter how I modify tags (whether undefined, as whitespace, or otherwise) I get various errors like $or/$and/$nor entries need to be full objects and TypeError: Cannot read property 'hasOwnProperty' of undefined.
Is there a way to build an optional requirement into the query?
I tried the option below and the query is just returning everything that matches the other fields. For some reason it isn't filtering by tags. I did a console.log(queryArr) and console.log(query) get the following respectively:
[
{ user_id: { '$nin': [Array] } },
{
date: {
'$gte': 1985-01-01T00:00:00.000Z,
'$lt': 2020-01-01T00:00:00.000Z
}
},
push: { documentTags: { '$all': [Array] } }
]
console.log(query)
{
'$and': [
{ user_id: [Object] },
{ date: [Object] },
push: { documentTags: [Object] }
]
}

Answer 1

You are almost there. Instead you could construct the object outside the query and just put the constructed query in $and when done..
let queryArr = [
{
user_id: {$nin: myUserId}
},
{ date: { $gte: dateMax, $lt: dateMin } }
];
if (req.body.tags) {
queryArr.push({videoTags: {$all: req.body.tags}});
}
let query = {
$and: queryArr
}
Now you can control the query by just pushing object into the query Array itself.

Answer 2

I figured out why it wasn't working. Basically, when you do myVar.push it creates a key-value pair such as [1,2,3,push:value]. This would work if you needed to append a k-v pair in that format, but you'll have difficulty using it in a query like mine. The right way for me turned out to be to use concact which appends the array with just the value that you set, rather than a k-v pair.
if (req.body.tags){
queryArgs = queryArgs.concat({documentTags: {$all: tags}});
}
let query = {
$and: queryArgs
}