Mongoose, does this model already exist in the collection - mongodb

Question

I'm using Mongoose on a Node.js server to save data into MongoDB. What I want to do is to check and see if a model object exists in the collection already.
For example heres my model:
var ApiRequest = new Schema({
route: String,
priority: String,
maxResponseAge: String,
status: String,
request: Schema.Types.Mixed,
timestamp: { type: Date, default: Date.now }
});
And here's what I would like to do:
var Request = mongoose.model('api-request', ApiRequest);
function newRequest(req, type) {
return new Request({
'route' : req.route.path,
'priority' : req.body.priority,
'maxResponseAge' : req.body.maxResponseAge,
'request' : getRequestByType(req, type)
});
}
function main(req, type, callback) {
var tempReq = newRequest(req, type);
Request.findOne(tempReq, '', function (err, foundRequest) {
// Bla bla whatever
callback(err, foundRequest);
});
}
The big issues I'm finding are that the tempReq which is a model has an _id variable and a timestamp that is going to be different from what is saved in the database. So I would like to ignore those fields and compare by everything else.
As a note my actual models have more variables than this hence the reason I don't want to use .find({ param : val, ....})..... and instead would like to use the existing model for comparison.
Any ideas? Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to use plain JS objects instead of Mongoose model instances as query objects (the first parameter to find).
So either:
Change newRequest to return a plain object and later pass that into a new Request() call if you need to add it to the database.
OR
In your main function turn tempReq into a query object like this:
var query = tempReq.toObject();
delete query._id;
Request.findOne(query, ...