Mongoose: How to find documents by sub-collection's document property value - node.js

Question

I’m using Mongoose version 4.6.8 and MongoLab (MLab). I have a Mongoose schema called “Group” that has a collection of User subdocuments called “teachers”:
var GroupSchema = new Schema({
//…more properties here…//
teachers: [{
type: Schema.ObjectId,
ref: 'User'
}]
});
This is a document from the “groups” collection on MongoLab:
{
//…more properties here…//
"teachers": [
{
"$oid": "5799a9c759feea9c208c004c"
}
]
}
And this is a document from the “users” collection on MongoLab:
{
//…more properties here…//
"username": "bob"
}
But if I want to get a list of Groups that have a particular teacher (User) with the username of “bob”, this doesn’t work (the list of groups is empty):
Group.find({"teachers.username": "bob"}).exec(callback);
This also returns no items:
Group.find().where('teachers.username').equals('bob').exec(callback);
How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

Without some more knowledge of your set up (specifically whether you want anybody named Bob or a specific Bob whose id you could pick up first) - this might be some help although I think it would require you to flatten your teachers array to just their ID's, not single-key objects.
User.findById(<Id of Bob>, function(err, user){
Group.find({}, function(err, groups){
var t = groups.map(function(g){
if(g['teachers'].indexOf(user.id))
return g
})
// Do something with t
})
})

Answer 2

You can use populate to do that.
Try this:
Group.find({})
.populate({
path : 'teachers' ,
match : { username : "bob" }
})
.exec(callback);
populate will populate based on the teachers field (given path) and match will return only those who have username bob.
For more information on mongoose populate options, Please read Mongoose populate documentation.

Answer 3

I think the solution in this case is to get a teacher’s groups through the User module instead of my first inclination which was to go through the Groups module. This makes sense because it is in line with how modern APIs represent a one-to-many relationship.
As an example, in Behance’s API, an endpoint for a user’s projects is:
GET /v2/users/user/projects
And a request to this endpoint (where the User’s username is “matiascorea”) would look like this:
https://api.behance.net/v2/users/matiascorea/projects?client_id=1234567890
So in my case, instead of finding the groups by teacher, I would need to simply find the User (teacher) by username, populate the teacher’s groups, and use them:
User.findOne({username: 'bob'})
.populate('groups')
.exec(callback);
And the API call for this would be:
GET /api/users/user/groups
And a request to this endpoint would look like this:
https://example.com/api/users/bob/groups