Mongoose: Saving as associative array of subdocuments vs array of subdocuments - mongodb

Question

I have a set of documents I need to maintain persistence for. Due to the way MongoDB handle's multi-document operations, I need to embed this set of documents inside a container document in order to ensure atomicity of my operations.
The data lends itself heavily to key-value pairing. Is there any way instead of doing this:
var container = new mongoose.Schema({
// meta information here
subdocs: [{key: String, value: String}]
})
I can instead have subdocs be an associative array (i.e. an object) that applies the subdoc validations? So a container instance would look something like:
{
// meta information
subdocs: {
<key1>: <value1>,
<key2>: <value2>,
...
<keyN>: <valueN>,
}
}
Thanks

Answer 1

Using Mongoose, I don't believe that there is a way to do what you are describing. To explain, let's take an example where your keys are dates and the values are high temperatures, to form pairs like { "2012-05-31" : 88 }.
Let's look at the structure you're proposing:
{
// meta information
subdocs: {
"2012-05-30" : 80,
"2012-05-31" : 88,
...
"2012-06-15": 94,
}
}
Because you must pre-define schema in Mongoose, you must know your key names ahead of time. In this use case, we would probably not know ahead of time which dates we would collect data for, so this is not a good option.
If you don't use Mongoose, you can do this without any problem at all. MongoDB by itself excels at inserting values with new key names into an existing document:
> db.coll.insert({ type : "temperatures", subdocuments : {} })
> db.coll.update( { type : "temperatures" }, { $set : { 'subdocuments.2012-05-30' : 80 } } )
> db.coll.update( { type : "temperatures" }, { $set : { 'subdocuments.2012-05-31' : 88 } } )
{
"_id" : ObjectId("5238c3ca8686cd9f0acda0cd"),
"subdocuments" : {
"2012-05-30" : 80,
"2012-05-31" : 88
},
"type" : "temperatures"
}
In this case, adding Mongoose on top of MongoDB takes away some of MongoDB's native flexibility. If your use case is well suited by this feature of MongoDB, then using Mongoose might not be the best choice.

Answer 2

you can achieve this behavior by using {strict: false} in your mongoose schema, although you should check the implications on the validation and casting mechanism of mongoose.
var flexibleSchema = new Schema( {},{strict: false})
another way is using schema.add method but i do not think this is the right solution.
the last solution i see is to get all the array to the client side and use underscore.js or whatever library you have. but it depends on your app, size of docs, communication steps etc.