Compare two collections in MongoDb and remove common - node.js

Question

I have three collections in MongoDB
achievements
students
student_achievements
achievements is a list of achievements a students can achieve in an academic year while
students collections hold data list of students in the school.
student_achievements holds documents where each documents contains studentId & achievementId.
I have an interface where i use select2 multiselect to allocate one or more achievements from achievements to students from students and save it to their collection student_achievements, right now to do this i populate select2 with available achievements from database. I have also made an arrangement where if a student is being allocated same achievement again the system throws an error.
what i am trying to achieve is if an achievement is allocated to student that shouldn't be available in the list or removed while fetching the list w.r.t student id,
what function in mongodb or its aggregate framework can i use to achieve this i.e to compare to collections and remove out the common.

Answer 1

Perhaps your data-structure could be made different to make the problem easier to solve. MongoDB is a NoSQL schemaless store, don't try to make it be like a relational database.
Perhaps we could do something like this:
var StudentSchmea = new Schema({
name: String,
achievements: [{ type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Achivement' }]
});
Then you can do something like this which will only add the value if it is unique to the achievements array:
db.student.update(
{ _id: 1 },
{ $addToSet: { achievements: <achivement id> } }
)
If you are using something like Mongoose you can also write your own middleware to remove orphaned docs:
AchivementSchema.post('remove', function(next) {
// Remove all references to achievements in Student schema
});
Also, if you need to verify that the achievement exists before adding it to the set, you can do a findOne query before updating/inserting to verify.
Even with the post remove hook in place, there are certain cases where you will end up with orphaned relationships potentially. The best thing to do for those situations is to have a regularly run cron task to to do cleanup when needed. These are some of the tradeoffs you encounter when using a NoSQL store.