Polymorphic user model with mongoose and node.js

Question

I am making an application with the mean.js boilerplate. It is a recruitment engine with users as employers and candidates. Now Employers and candidates should be stored as separate documents and every user must have only one employer or a candidate, as every candidate or employer needs to login with the user object.

I did this in rails with postgresql as:

## User
  belongs_to :profileable, :polymorphic => true

## Candidate and Employer
  has_one :user, :as => :profileable

With mongoose this is what I've done so far using the package 'mongoose-schema-extend':

var extend = require('mongoose-schema-extend');

var UserSchema = new Schema({
    email: {
        type: String
    },
    password: {
        type: String
    }
}, { collection: 'users', discriminatorKey : '_type' });


var CandidateSchema = UserSchema.extend({
    Experience: {
        type: Number
    }
});

var EmployerSchema = user.user.extend({
    companyName: {
        type: String
    }
});

above code works but in mongodb only creates documents for users with _type attribute set as candidate or employer.

What I think it should do is store candidates, employers and users as separate documents. I have to later associate employers to a company and jobs. Also I need to query candidates and employers separately with different criteria.

What is the best approach to achieve the functionality?

Bonar

Did you get anywhere with this? Looking to do polymorphic relations too, and I'm also from a Rails background. – Trahurn

Answer 1

The scenairo can be handled with mognoose discriminators.

according to mongoose docs :

Discriminators are a schema inheritance mechanism. They enable you to have multiple models with overlapping schemas on top of the same underlying MongoDB collection.

Theres not a lot of tutorials that I could find on discriminators but, heres a link that I found useful: http://thecodebarbarian.com/2015/07/24/guide-to-mongoose-discriminators

Thanks

Bonar