Mongo - What is best design: store menu documents or menu item documents? - mongodb

Question

I want to store website menus in Mongo for the navigation of my CMS, but since I'm new to Mongo and the concept of documents, I'm trying to figure out what would be best:
a) Should I store menu documents, containing children and those having more children, or
b) Should I store menu item documents with parent_id and child_ids ?
Both would appear to have benefits, since in case A it's normal to load an entire menu at once as you'll need everything to display, but B might be easier to update single items?
I'm using Spring data mongo.
PS: If I asked this question in a wrong way, please let me know. I'm sure this question can be expanded to any general parent-child relationship, but I was having trouble finding the right words.

Answer 1

Since menus are typically going to be very small (under 16MB I hope) then the embedded form should give you the best performance:
{
"topItem1": [
{ "name": "item1", "link": "linkValue" },
{ "name": "item2", "link": "linkValue" }
],
"topItem2": [
{ "name": "item1", "link": "linkValue" },
{ "name": "item2", "link": "linkValue" }
{
"name": "sub-menu",
"type": "sub",
"items": [
{ "name": "item1", "link": "linkValue" },
{ "name": "item2", "link": "linkValue" }
}
}
]
}
The only possible issue there is with updating the content inside nested arrays, as MngoDB can only "match" the first found array index. See the positional $ operator documentation for this.
But as long as you know the positions then this should not be a problem, using "dot notation" concepts:
db.menu.update({}, {
"$set": {
"topItem2.2.items.1": { "name": "item3", "link": "linkValue" }
}
})
But general adding should be simple:
db.menu.update(
{ "topItem2.name": "sub-menu" },
{
"$push": {
"topItem2.2.items": { "name": "item4", "link": "linkValue" }
}
}
)
So that is a perspective on how to use the inherrent embedded structure rather than associate "parent" and "child" items.

Answer 2

After long hard thinking I believe I would use:
{
_id: {},
submenu1: [
{label: "Whatever", url: "http://localhost/whatever"}
]
}
I thought about using related documents with IDs all sitting in a collection but then you would have to shoot off multiple queries to get the parent and its range, possibly even sub-sub ranges too. With this structure you have only one query for all.
This structure is not infallible however, if you change your menu items regularly you might start to notice fragmentation. You can remedy this a little with powerof2sizes allocation: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/command/collMod/#usePowerOf2Sizes
But yes, with careful planning you should be able to use one single document for every parent menu item