need guidance on node.js multilingual presentation - node.js

Question

I am new to node (v0.10) stack.
I am trying to achieve the following:
I have (hopefully) multilingual articles in the latest MongoDB such as:
_id
...more fields...
text: [
{lang: 'en', title: 'some title', body: 'body', slug: 'slug'},
....
]
Everytime I display an article in specific language I query as follows:
var query = Model.findOne({'text.slug': slug});
query.exec(function(err, doc){
async.each(doc.text, function(item, callback){
if (item.lang == articleLang) {
//populate the article to display
}
});
res.render('view', {post:articleToDisplay});
});
Slug is unique for each language!
The problem I have is that mongo will return the whole doc with all subdocs and not just the subdoc I searched for. Now I have to choose to iterate over all subdocs and display the appropriate one on client side or use async.each on the server to get the subdoc I need and only send to the views that one. I am doing it with async on the server. Is that OK? Also async iterates asynchronously but node still waits for the whole loop to finish and then renders the view. Am I missing anything thinking that the user is actually blocked until the async.each finishes? I am still trying to wrap my head around this asynchronous execution. Is there a way I can possibly improve how I manage this code? It seems to be quite standard procedure with subdocs!
Thanks in advance for all your help.

Answer 1

To achieve what you want, you need to make use of the aggregation pipeline. Using a simple findOne() would not be of help,
since you would then have to redact sub documents in your code rather than allowing mongodb to do it. find() and findOne() return the whole document when
a document matches the search criteria.
In the aggregation pipleline you could use the $unwind and $match operators to achieve this.
$unwind:
Deconstructs an array field from the input documents to output a
document for each element. Each output document is the input document
with the value of the array field replaced by the element.
First unwind the document based on the text values array.
$match:
Filters the documents to pass only the documents that match the
specified condition(s) to the next pipeline stage.
Then use the $match operator to match the appropriate documents.
db.Model.aggregate([
{$unwind:"$text"},
{$match:{"text.slug":slug,"text.lang":articleLang}}
])
Doing this would return you only one document with its text field containing only one object. such as: (Note that the text field in the output is not an array)
{ "_id" : ... ,.., "text" : { "slug" : "slug", "lang" : "en" ,...} }