Does using dbref do anything more than just storing an `id` - mongodb

Question

My Mongoose schema:
// set up the schema
var CategorySubSchema = new Schema({
name: { type: String },
_category_main : { type: String, ref: 'CategoryMain' }
},
And my controller code:
CategorySub.create({
name : req.body.name,
_category_main : req.body.category_main
}, function(err, data){
An entry in my db:
{
"_id": "54dd163434d78ae58f6b1a69",
"name": "Snacks",
"_category_main": "54dcf4a71dfecb4d86ddcb87",
"__v": 0
},
So I used an underscore, because I was following an example. Does this mean anything to the database or is it just convention for references?
Also, instead of passing the entire JSON object in the request - req.body.category_main, why not just pass and id and change my schema to this?:
var CategorySubSchema = new Schema({
name: { type: String },
category_main_id : { type: String }
},

Answer 1

In short, Yes.
The below schema definition is an example of Manual references.
var CategorySubSchema = new Schema({
name: { type: String },
category_main_id : { type: String }
}
where,
you save the _id field of one document in another document as a
reference. Then your application can run a second query to return the
related data. These references are simple and sufficient for most use
cases.
In this case, we need to write explicit application code to fetch the referred document and resolve the reference. Since the driver that we use wouldn't know about the collection in which the referred document is present nor the database in which the referred document is present.
When you define the schema as below, this is an example of storing the details of the referred document .(Database references)
var CategorySubSchema = new Schema({
name: { type: String },
_category_main : { type: String, ref: 'CategoryMain' }
}
They include the name of the collection, and in some cases the
database name, in addition to the value from the _id field.
These details allow various drivers to resolve the references by themselves, since the name of the collection and the database(optional) of the referred document would be contained in the document itself, rather than we writing explicit application code to resolve the references.
So I used an underscore, because I was following an example. Does this mean anything to the database or is it just convention for
references?
Using underscore in the _id field is a valid naming convention, but mongoDb doesn't explicitly mention about the naming convention of other fields which are used to resolve references. You could just use any other field name as long as it conforms to this.