Reference an _id in a Subdocument in another Collection Mongodb - mongodb

Question

I am developing an application with mongodb and nodejs
I should also mention that I am new to both so please help me through this question
my database has a collection categories and then in each category I am storing products in subdocument
just like below :
{
_id : ObjectId(),
name: String,
type: String,
products : [{
_id : ObjectId(),
name : String,
description : String,
price : String
}]
});
When it comes to store the orders in database the orders collection will be like this:
{
receiver : String,
status : String,
subOrders : [
{
products :[{
productId : String,
name : String,
price : String,
status : String
}],
tax : String,
total : String,
status : String,
orderNote : String
}
]
}
As you can see we are storing _id of products which is a subdocument of categories in orders
when storing there is no issue obviously, when it comes to fetch these data if we just need the limited field like name or price there will be no issue as well, but if later on we need some extra fields from products like description,... they are not stored in orders.
My question is this:
Is there any easy way to access other fields of products apart from loop through the whole categories in mongodb, namely I need a sample code for querying the description of a product by only having its _id in mongodb?
or our design and implementation was wrong and I have to re-design it from scratch and separate the products from categories into another collection?
please don't put links to websites or weblogs that generally talks about mongodb and its collections implementations unless they focus on a very similar issue to mine
thanks in advance

Answer 1

I'd assume that you'd want to return as many product descriptions as matched the current list of products, so first, there isn't a query to return only matching array elements. Using $elemMatch you can return a specific element or the first match, but not only matching array elements. However, $elemMatch can also be used as a projection operator.
db.categories({ "products._id" : "PID1" },
{ $elemMatch : { "products._id" : "PID1" },
"products._id" : 1,
"products.description" : 1})
You'd definitely want to index the "products._id" field to achieve reasonable performance.
You might consider instead creating a products collection where each document contains a category identifier, much like you would in a relational database. This is a common pattern in MongoDb when embedding doesn't make sense, or complicates queries and aggregations.
Assuming that is true:
You'll need to load the data from the second collection manually. There are no joins in MognoDb. You might consider using $in which takes a list of values for a field and loads all matching documents.
Depending on the driver you're using to access MongoDb, you should be able to use the projection feature of find, which can limit the fields returned for a document to just those you've specified.
As product descriptions ardently likely to change frequently, you might also consider caching the values for a period on the client (like a web server for example).
db.products.find({ _id: { $in : [ 'PID1', 'PID2'] } }, { description : 1 })