Mongoose.js - population and additional fields?

Question

I want to add some additional data to UserModel like watchedMovies and I have following schema:

let userSchema = new Schema({
  watchedMovies: [{
    type: Schema.Types.ObjectId,
    ref: 'Movie'
  }]
})

and:

let movieSchema = new Schema({
  title: String
})

I was wondering is it possible to add any additional fields to watchedMovies object and store it along with ObjectId? I would like to add watchedAt date so when I'm populating watchedMovies with UserModel.find().populate('watchedMovies', 'title').exec(...) I would get something like:

{
  _id: ObjectId(UserId),
  watchedMovies: [{
    _id: ObjectId(...),
    title: 'Some title',
    watchedAt: TimeStamp
  }]
}

watchedAt attribute specifies when (Date object) reference was added to UserModel

Is it possible with mongoose and how should I change my schema?

Thank You

Incest

Can you edit your question and show what the Movie model mongoose schema is like? – Lashonlashond

Oh, yes, just edited that – Incest

Answer 1

Change your schema to

let userSchema = new Schema({
  watchedMovies: [{
    movie: {
        type: Schema.Types.ObjectId,
        ref: 'Movie'
    },
    watchedAt: Date
  }]
})

then you can populate by .populate('watchedMovies.movie')

Intinction

I know that, but the question is not about that. – Incest

what exactly is your question about, then? to me it sounds like you're asking how to get more fields than just the title back when you use .populate. that's not a very helpful way to respond to an incorrect answer – Intinction

When I'm adding reference to user model (reference of movie) I would like to store a timestamp when was that reference saved, i.e. to know when user watched that movie – Incest

I just tried that and it seems that it does not work. Is it supposed to work and I'm doing something wrong, or you try to guess the implementation? :) – Incest

Don't know what happened yesterday (probably it was already too late) but now in the morning after trying again - it seems to just be working as expected. Thank you very much! – Incest

how to do the insert if I'm using above schema – Ibadan