Mongoose schema for arrays of refs with role - node.js

Question

I'm very new to the NoSQL way of doing things so please excuse me if I'm just thinking about this completely wrong (I feel like I am).
My application has Users and Organizations, and the Users must have and belong to those Organizations with a role of member or owner.
Currently in my schema for my Users I have:
orgs: [{ type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Org' }]
and in my schema for my Organizations I have:
members: [{ type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'User' }]
but I would also like to attach a role of member or owner to this.
Is this something I should put in the actual reference somehow like:
members: [{ type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'User', role: String }]
or should the role be elsewhere in the schema? What is the proper way to handle this or is there a different way to schematize this that is more appropriate?
And once I have the schema set up for this properly, it would be helpful to have an example of how to create a few users/orgs with this roled ref.

Answer 1

You can do this with a small change to what you have there. I store messages in an app the same way (text and sender).
Here's what you could do:
members: [{
role: {
type: String
},
user: {
type: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId,
ref: 'User'
}
}],
Then when you want to add a member or members to an organization (assume you have already created an organization and a user separately):
function addNewMember(org_id, user_id, role) {
var member = {role: role, user: user_id};
Organization.findByIdAndUpdate(org_id, {"$push": {"members":member}}, function(err,org) {
...
});)
// you can use the $each clause to add a whole array of members at the same time too
// like so:
// {"$push": {"members":
// {
// "$each": [memberarray]
// }}}
}
And when you want to find an organization including it's members, you could do:
Organization.findById(org_id)
.populate('members.user')
.exec(callbackfunction);
Think carefully if you do absolutely need to duplicate the Organization -> member relationship for each member too as Member -> organizations. If this is indeed important, after successfully adding the user to the organization, in the callback you can do a second query to update the user's orgs field just like above.