Tag: mongoose

There is a certain magic in ORMs like Mongoose. I learned it the hard way (as usual!), when I was trying to iterate over nested object’s properties. For example, here is a schema with a nested object features defines like this:

var User = module.exports = new Schema({
  features: { 
    realtime_updates: {
      type: Boolean
    },
    storylock: {
      type: Boolean
    },
    custom_embed_style: {
      type: Boolean
    },
    private_stories: {
      type: Boolean
    },
    headerless_embed:{
      type: Boolean
    }
};

Let’s say I want to overwrite object features_enabled with these properties:

if (this.features) { 
  for (var k in this.features) {
    features_enabled[k] = this.features[k];
  }
}
console.log(features_enabled)
return features_enabled;

Not so fast, I was getting a lot of system properties specific to Mongoose. Instead we need to use toObject(), e.g.:

if (this.features.toObject()) { 
  for (var k in this.features.toObject()) {
    console.log('!',k)
    features_enabled[k] = this.features.toObject()[k];
  }
}

Remember rule number one, computer is always right. If we think that it’s wrong — look up the rule number one. :-)