How to make a subdocument have two parent documents in mongodb? - node.js

Question

I'm using mongoose with Node.js for an application. I have a Document class, which has a Review subdocument. I also have a User class.
I want the user to be able to see all the reviews they've done, while I also want the Document to be able to easily get all of its reviews. Searching through all the documents and all their reviews to find ones matching a user seems horribly ineffecient. So, how do I allow the Review to be owned by both a Document and a User?
If this is impossible, how else can I efficiently have two documents know about one subdocument.

Answer 1

If you don't want to deal with consistency issues I don't think there's any way except for normalization to assign two parents for a document. Your issue is a common one for social networks, when developers have to deal with friends, followers, etc. Usually the best solution depends on what queries you are gonna run, what data is volatile and what is not and how many children a document might have. Usually it turns out to be a balance between embedding and referencing. Here's what I would do if I were you:
Let's assume Documents usually have 0-5 Reviews. Which is a few, so we might consider embed Reviews into Documents. Also we would often need to display reviews every time a Document is queried, this is one more reason for embedding. Now we need a way to query all reviews by a User efficiently. Assume we don't run this query as often as the first one but still it is important. Let's also assume that when we query for User's Reviews we just want to display Review titles as links to Review page or even Document page as probably it's hard to read a review without seeing the actual Document. So the best way here would be to store { document_id, review_id, reviewTitle }. ReviewTitle should not be volatile in this case. So now when you have a User object, you can easily query for reviews. Using document_id you will filter out most documents and it will be super fast. Then you can get required Reviews either on the client side or by using MapReduce to turn Reviews into separate list of documents.
This example contains many assumption so it might not be exactly what you need by my goal was to show you the most important things to consider while designing your collections and the logic you should follow. So just to sum up, consider QUERIES, HOW VOLATILE SOME DATA IS and HOW MANY CHILDREN A DOCUMENT IS GONNA HAVE, and find a balance between embeding and referencing
Hope it helps!

Answer 2

This is an old question, but here is a solution that, I think, works well:
var mongoose = require('mongoose'),
Schema = mongoose.Schema;
var DocumentSchema = new Schema({
title: String,
...
});
mongoose.model('Document', DocumentSchema);
var UserSchema = new Schema({
name: String,
...
});
mongoose.model('User', UserSchema);
var ReviewSchema = new Schema({
created: {
type: Date,
default: Date.now
},
document: {
type: Schema.ObjectId,
ref: 'Document'
},
reviewer: {
type: Schema.ObjectId,
ref: 'User'
},
title: String,
body: String
});
Then, you could efficiently query the Reviews to get all reviews for a User, or for a Document.
Hope this helps someone.