Mongoose + Populate a property in a subdocument

Question

With mongoose, I want to populate a property inside a subdocument of my main document. Here is my models:

var device = {
    deviceId: {type: String, required: true},
    number: {type: Number, default: 0}
};

var notification = new Schema({
   createdAt: {type: Date, default: Date.now},
   device: {type: Schema.ObjectId, ref: 'Device'}
});

var clientSchema = new Schema({
    [...]
    information: {
        code: {type: String, required: true},
        name: {type: String, required: true}
    },
    notifications: [notification],
    [...]
});

What I'm trying to do it's to get notifications with the device populated.

I tried this:

 clientModel.findOne({"information.code": id})
      .populate('notifications')
      .populate('notifications.device')
      .exec(function(err, client) {
          if (err) {
              console.log(err);
              next(err, null);
          }
          if (client) {
              console.log(client.notifications);
              next(null, client.notifications);
          }
      });

And I got this

[{ device: 55634975d20f1f3903ff4325,
   _id: 5564b1139ac484db0251b4a2,
   createdAt: Tue May 26 2015 19:44:51 GMT+0200 (CEST) }]

Anyone can tell me what I'm doing wrong please ?? Thanks for your help guys :)

possible duplicate of [Mongoose: deep population (populate a populated field)](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18867628/mongoose-deep-population-populate-a-populated-field) — laggingreflex, May 28 '15 at 03:05

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 11 '15 at 22:37

0

In your clientSchema notifications is an embed so you do not need to populate it. Try to remove the populate('notifications') in your query. You should just need the populate('notifications.device').

answered Jun 11 '15 at 22:37

Julien Bachmann

753
8
18

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 06 '16 at 22:27

The correct way to populate is:

clientModel.findOne({"information.code": id})
      .populate('notifications.device')
      .exec(function(err, client) {
          if (err) {
              console.log(err);
              next(err, null);
          }
          if (client) {
              console.log(client.notifications);
              next(null, client.notifications);
          }
      });

Note that the use of .populate('notifications') is unnecessary because notification is not referenced but embedded. This line could be causing the problem.

Mongoose + Populate a property in a subdocument

2 Answers2