Tag: mongoose

When using a Mongoose model, if you have a reference to a queried document, you’ll notice that you cannot call hasOwnProperty() to check if it has a certain property. For example, if you have a User model, and the schema has a property called “verified”, if you call user.hasOwnProperty(‘verified’), it will not return true!

This is because the object you get back from your mongoose query doesn’t access properties directly.

An easy and quick workaround is like so:

var userObject = user.toObject();
if(userObject.hasOwnProperty('verified'))
  //...

And now hasOwnProperty() will return true.

This had me scratching my head for a while until I figured it out. Let’s say you have a MongoDB model which has an array in it. If you’ve got a reference to a document which you pulled using Mongoose, and you update a value in the array, then you call document.save(), the array will not get updated!

Turns out you need to use the document.markModified(arrayName) function calling document.save().

Here’s an example. Let’s say your model looks like this:

var UserSchema = new Schema({
  //...
  emailSubscriptions: {
    type: Array,
    'default': ["all"]
  }
});
exports.model = mongoose.model('User', UserSchema);

So after you get a user and modify an array (in this case emailSubscriptions), you’ll need to mark it as modified before saving it:

User.findById(userId, function(err, user) {
  user.emailSubscriptions = ['none'];
  user.markModified('emailSubscriptions');
  user.save(function(err, user) {
    //...
  });
});