What's a good way to look up list of enumerated values? - mongodb

Question

I have a collection of case with a field named status (integer) whose valid values are 0, 1, 2, 4 and 8, representing "New", "WIP", "Solved", "Canceled" and "Closed" respectively.
So, in mongoose syntax, it might be like:
const caseSchema = new Schema({
createdOn: Date,
subittedBy: String,
status: Number,
...
});
const statusSchema = new Schema({
value: Number,
description: String
});
Is this a good way to organize the data? How do I make a query to retrieve cases with the status field properly filled with the description?

Answer 1

It is one way to do it sure. You could do the query by using $lookup. It would look something like this:
db.getCollection('<YourCasesColName>').aggregate([
{ $match : { 'status' : 1 } }, // or { $in: [1,2,3] },
{
$lookup: {
from: '<YourStatusColName>',
localField: 'status',
foreignField: 'value',
as: 'statusDoc',
}
}
])
Another way is to add a reference to the actual status via ObjectId so that instead of numbers in the cases you would be storing references to the actual Status objects and in this way have a better referential integrity. However you would still need to do similar query to get both in one shot. So here is what I am talking about:
const caseSchema = new Schema({
createdOn: Date,
subittedBy: String,
status: { type: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Status' },
// ^ now your status hows reference to exactly the type of status it has
});
const statusSchema = new Schema({
value: Number,
description: String
});
So the actual data would look like this:
// Statuses
[{
_id: <StatusMongoObjectID_1>,
value: 1,
description: 'New'
},{
_id: <StatusMongoObjectID_2>,
value: 2,
description: 'New'
}]
// Cases
[{
_id: <MongoObjectID>,
createdOn: '<SomeISODate>',
subittedBy: '<SomeString>',
status: <StatusMongoObjectID_1>
},
{
_id: <MongoObjectID>,
createdOn: '<SomeISODate>',
subittedBy: '<SomeString>',
status: <StatusMongoObjectID_2>
}]