mongoose-glue

mongoose-glue

  

Mongoose is one of the best ODMs for MongoDB. Mongoose provides a straight-forward, schema-based solution to modeling your application data and includes built-in type casting, validation, query building, business logic hooks and more, out of the box.

Mongoose does not require a specific structure of your project files. This is great but it always rises a common question on how to use a library within a project in a proper way. We do not want to manually figure the right way on how to split the code into multiple files every time we start a new Mongoose project. Things can be quite complicated especially when dealing with multiple database instances.

Mongoose-glue brings a unified MVC-style structure for models into your NodeJS project.

Installation

Install the npm package.

npm install mongoose-glue --save

Setup

Let's first configure project's database connections. By default the module will try to read the config/mongoose.js configuration file so let's create one. The file content should look like the example bellow.

// config/mongoose.js
module.exports = {

  default: {

    'mongo1': {
      uris: 'mongodb://user:secret@hostname:port/database',
      options: {}
    },

    'mongo2': {
      uris: 'mongodb://user:secret@hostname:port/database',
      options: {}
    }
  },

  production: {}
};

The next step is to define models. The module will load files found at app/models. Let's create two models for mongo1 database.

// app/models/animal.js (mongoose model)
module.exports = {
  connection: 'mongo1',
  attributes: {
    name: 'string'
  },
  classMethods: {},
  instanceMethods: {},
  plugins: [],
  middleware: {},
  options: {}
};

// app/models/bird.js (mongoose discriminator of animal)
module.exports = {
  connection: 'mongo1',
  extends: 'animal'
};

Now we only have to load and connect database connections and models together to make it work. The best place to do this is inside your project's main file (e.g. index.js).

// index.js
var _ = require('mongoose-glue');
_.connect();

Configuration

The module can be configured by sending options to the _.connect method. See the list of available options bellow.

_.connect({

  // Path to a file where database connections are defined.
  configPath: 'new/file/path.js',

  // Path to a directory with models files.
  modelsPath: 'new/directory/path',

  // Custom logger function (set to `false` by default).
  logger: console.log

});

API

After the project has been setup we can access any model like this:

var _ = require('mongoose-glue');
var Bird = _.model('bird');

Bird.create({ name: "Fluppy" }, function(err, data) {
  console.log('Mongoose Fluppy bird created.');
});

You can directly access the mongoose module and its elements.

var _ = require('mongoose-glue');
var mongoose = _.mongoose;
var ObjectId = _.types.ObjectId;

You can also access an instance of a database connection.

var _ = require('mongoose-glue');
var conn = _.connection('mongo1');