Mongoose: deep population (populate a populated field)

Question

I have Category model:

Category:
    ...
    articles: [{type:ObjectId, ref:\'Article\'}]

Article model contains ref to

Answer 1

If you want select multi populate inside populate, you should try this way:

I have Booking schema:

let Booking = new Schema({
  ...,  // others field of collection
  experience: { type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Experience' },
  ...},{
    collection: 'booking'
  });

and Experience schema:

let Experience = new Schema({
  ...,
  experienceType: {type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'ExperienceType'},
  location: {type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Location'},
  ...} // others field of collection
  ,{
    collection: 'experience'
  });

get ExperienceType and Location of Experience when you find Booking:

Booking.findOne({_id: req.params.id})
  .populate({path: 'experience',
    populate: [{path: 'experienceType', select: 'name'}, {path: 'location', select: 'name'}],
  })
  .exec((err, booking) => {
    if(err){
      console.log(err);
    }
    else {
      res.json(booking);
    }
  });

Answer 2

Firstly, update mongoose 3 to 4 & then use the simplest way for deep population in mongoose as below :

Suppose you have Blog schema having userId as ref Id & then in User you have some review as ref Id for schema Review. So Basically, you have three schema : 1. Blog 2. User 3. Review

And, you have to query from blog, which user owns this blog & the user review. So you can query your result as :

BlogModel
  .find({})
  .populate({
    path : 'userId',
    populate : {
      path : 'reviewId'
    }
  })
  .exec(function (err, res) {

  })

Answer 3

Sorry to burst your bubble, but there's not a directly supported solution to this. As for Github issue #601, it looks grim. According to the 3.6 release notes, it looks like the developers acknowledged the issue are happy with manual recursive/deep population.

So from the release notes, the recommended method is to nest populated calls in the callback, so in your exec() function, use categories.populate to further populate before sending a response.

Answer 4

Or you can pass Object to the populate method as:

const myFilterObj = {};
const populateObj = {
                path: "parentFileds",
                populate: {
                    path: "childFileds",
                    select: "childFiledsToSelect"
                },
                select: "parentFiledsToSelect"
               };
Model.find(myFilterObj)
     .populate(populateObj).exec((err, data) => console.log(data) );