How to query username from userId in a collection in Meteor? - mongodb

I am trying to implement a basic search bar functionality in my app.
I have a bunch of articles, and everyone has an owner. This is specified by the userId in the user parameter of each article.
Right now I can search for keywords within the article, the title, and the date. However I want to be able to query for the username of the author of the article, but I only have the userId available to me...
var keyword = Session.get("search-query");
var query = new RegExp( keyword, 'i' );
var results = Articles.find( { $or: [{'user': query}, // this is only searching userId of the author!
{'title': query},
{'articleText': query},
{'datetime': query}] } );
return {results: results};
I'm not sure how to do this...

Welcome to non-relational databases! You're coming from an RDBMS environment so you expect joins. There are none. Store the username in the article it belongs to, then yes, if a user change their username, you'll need to loop through the collection and update the username where the _id matches.
Please look here for mongo strategies (this isn't Meteor-specific at all): http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/data-modeling/
PS: If you get eye haemorrhaging whenever you look at your schema-which-actually-really-isn't-one, you can still give https://github.com/erundook/meteor-publish-with-relations a go - but note that under the hood it's going to get even 'worse' (have a look at your mongo opslog). Publish with relations is only there for convenience and ease of programming, not performance.
Good luck!

So I guess you'd have to either save the username as well as it's own field (or put both id and username in a user object), or search the Users collection for valid usernames, and when you found one use its id to search the Articles DB.
The first suggestion would probably be way more efficient I guess.

That's pretty easy, assuming you're doing the search on the server which has access to all the users:
var username = Meteor.users.findOne(userId).username;

Related

Firebase Firestore query by document id using swift

I am trying to query my database to get all the users where the document id is equal to the users id. I know that I can add that id as a field into the document, but I'd like to optimize the memory I take up, so I'd prefer accessing the document id directly through. Something like
.whereField(DOCUMENT_ID, isEqualTo, User.id)
DOCUMENT_ID is not a valid field so far as I know, and I don't know the equivalent. I have read around that other languages modules have a workaround like
.whereField(Firebase.firestore.FieldValues.documentId(), isEqualTo, User.id)
but I've heard hide nor hair of that in swiftUI. Any ideas?
To filter on the document ID in a query, you can use FieldPath.documentID() in Swift too: https://firebase.google.com/docs/reference/swift/firebasefirestore/api/reference/Classes/FieldPath#/c:objc(cs)FIRFieldPath(cm)documentID. But if you do this in a single document, that'd be the same as just doing document(User.id).

MongoDB ObjectId vs string in find()

I'm starting to play with mongodb, and I learned that when inserting a document, you can either provide an ID, or let mongodb generate it for you.
I thought this is nice, because I want to let my users optionally choose an id, and if not generate it for them.
But the problem is, the generated one is of type ObjectId while the user provided one is a string, and the find method only returns the correct answer if you pass it with the correct type. So when a user requests GET /widget/123, I have no idea if the original ID was stored as an ObjectId or a string do I?
So how am I supposed to use this feature?
First off, I'd recommend against letting users provide _ids: if 2 users want to use the same _id, the second user will be unable to, which will be frustrating. If users want that functionality, I'd recommend storing the user created id on a separate field & querying by user (or company or whatever) and the user-created id.
That said, mongo ObjectIds are 24 hex characters, so you can safely identify when an id is not a MongoId by checking whether it doesn't match /^[a-f0-9]{24}$/ (or by seeing whether a call to ObjectId("maybeAnObjectId") throws). In the case where it's unclear (where a user might have provided 24 hex characters as their id), you'll need to use $in (or $or) to query for both cases:
const query = /^[a-f0-9]{24}$/.test(id) ? { _id: {$in: [ObjectId(id), id]}} : {_id: id}
(an annoying user could re-use an autogenerated ObjectId as their string id, and then queries to that route would return two values and there'd be no way of differentiating them).

how to join a collection and sort it, while limiting results in MongoDB

lets say I have 2 collections wherein each document may look like this:
Collection 1:
target:
_id,
comments:
[
{ _id,
message,
full_name
},
...
]
Collection 2:
user:
_id,
full_name,
username
I am paging through comments via $slice, let's say I take the first 25 entries.
From these entries I need the according usernames, which I receive from the second collection. What I want is to get the comments sorted by their reference username. The problem is I can't add the username to the comments because they may change often and if so, I would need to update all target documents, where the old username was in.
I can only imagine one way to solve this. Read out the entire full_names and query them in the user collection. The result would be sortable but it is not paged and so it takes a lot of resources to do that with large documents.
Is there anything I am missing with this problem?
Thanks in advance
If comments are an embedded array, you will have to do work on the client side to sort the comments array unless you store it in sorted order. Your application requirements for username force you to either read out all of the usernames of the users who commented to do the sort, or to store the username in the comments and have (much) more difficult and expensive updates.
Sorting and pagination don't work unless you can return the documents in sorted order. You should consider a different schema where comments form a separate collection so that you can return them in sorted order and paginate them. Store the username in each comment to facilitate the sort on the MongoDB side. Depending on your application's usage pattern this might work better for you.
It also seems strange to sort on usernames and expect/allow usernames to change frequently. If you could drop these requirements it'd make your life easier :D

Confusion regarding Mongo db Schema. How to make it better?

I am using mongoose with node.js for this.
My current Schema is this:
var linkSchema = new Schema({
text: String,
tags: array,
body: String,
user: String
})
My use-case is this: There are a list of users and each user has a list of links associated with it. Users and links are different Schemas of course. Thus, how does one get that sort of one to one relationship done using mongo-db.
Should I make a User Schema and embed linkSchema in it? Or the other way around?
Another doubt regarding that. Tags would always be an array of strings which I can use to browse through links later. Should it be an array data type or is there a better way to represent it?
If it's 1:1 then nest one document inside the other. Which way around depends on the queries, but you could easily do both if you need to.
For tags, you can index an array field and use that for searching/filtering documents and from the information you've given that sounds reasonable IMHO.
If you had a fixed set of tags it would make sense to represent those as a nested object with named fields perhaps, depending on queries. Don't forget you not only can create nested documents in Mongo but you can also search on sub-fields and even use entire nested documents as searchable/indexable fields. For instance, you could have a username like this;
email: "joe#somewhere.com"
as a string, and you could also do;
email: {
user: "joe",
domain: "somewhere.com"
}
you could index email in both cases and use either for matching. In the latter case though you could also search on domain or user only without resorting to RegEx style queries. You could also store both variants, so there's lots of flexibile options in Mongo.
Going back to tags, I think your array of strings is a fine model given what you've described, but if you were doing more complex bulk aggregation, it wouldn't be crazy to store a document for every tag with the same document contents, since that's essentially what you'd have to do for every query during aggregation.

How do I describe a collection in Mongo?

So this is Day 3 of learning Mongo Db. I'm coming from the MySql universe...
A lot of times when I need to write a query for a MySql table I'm unfamiliar with, I would use the "desc" command - basically telling me what fields I should include in my query.
How would I do that for a Mongo db? I know, I know...I'm searching for a schema in a schema-less database. =) But how else would users know what fields to use in their queries?
Am I going at this the wrong way? Obviously I'm trying to use a MySql way of doing things in a Mongo db. What's the Mongo way?
Type the below query in editor / mongoshell
var col_list= db.emp.findOne();
for (var col in col_list) { print (col) ; }
output will give you name of columns in collection :
_id
name
salary
There is no good answer here. Because there is no schema, you can't 'describe' the collection. In many (most?) MongoDb applications, however, the schema is defined by the structure of the object hierarchy used in the writing application (java or c# or whatever), so you may be able to reflect over the object library to get that information. Otherwise there is a bit of trial and error.
This is my day 30 or something like that of playing around with MongoDB. Unfortunately, we have switched back to MySQL after working with MongoDB because of my company's current infrastructure issues. But having implemented the same model on both MongoDB and MySQL, I can clearly see the difference now.
Of course, there is a schema involved when dealing with schema-less databases like MongoDB, but the schema is dictated by the application, not the database. The database will shove in whatever it is given. As long as you know that admins are not secretly logging into Mongo and making changes, and all access to the database is controller through some wrapper, the only place you should look at for the schema is your model classes. For instance, in our Rails application, these are two of the models we have in Mongo,
class Consumer
include MongoMapper::Document
key :name, String
key :phone_number, String
one :address
end
class Address
include MongoMapper::EmbeddedDocument
key :street, String
key :city, String
key :state, String
key :zip, String
key :state, String
key :country, String
end
Now after switching to MySQL, our classes look like this,
class Consumer < ActiveRecord::Base
has_one :address
end
class Address < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :consumer
end
Don't get fooled by the brevity of the classes. In the latter version with MySQL, the fields are being pulled from the database directly. In the former example, the fields are right there in front of our eyes.
With MongoDB, if we had to change a particular model, we simply add, remove, or modify the fields in the class itself and it works right off the bat. We don't have to worry about keeping the database tables/columns in-sync with the class structure. So if you're looking for the schema in MongoDB, look towards your application for answers and not the database.
Essentially I am saying the exactly same thing as #Chris Shain :)
While factually correct, you're all making this too complex. I think the OP just wants to know what his/her data looks like. If that's the case, you can just
db.collectionName.findOne()
This will show one document (aka. record) in the database in a pretty format.
I had this need too, Cavachon. So I created an open source tool called Variety which does exactly this: link
Hopefully you'll find it to be useful. Let me know if you have questions, or any issues using it.
Good luck!
AFAIK, there isn't a way and it is logical for it to be so.
MongoDB being schema-less allows a single collection to have a documents with different fields. So there can't really be a description of a collection, like the description of a table in the relational databases.
Though this is the case, most applications do maintain a schema for their collections and as said by Chris this is enforced by your application.
As such you wouldn't have to worry about first fetching the available keys to make a query. You can just ask MongoDB for any set of keys (i.e the projection part of the query) or query on any set of keys. In both cases if the keys specified exist on a document they are used, otherwise they aren't. You will not get any error.
For instance (On the mongo shell) :
If this is a sample document in your people collection and all documents follow the same schema:
{
name : "My Name"
place : "My Place"
city : "My City"
}
The following are perfectly valid queries :
These two will return the above document :
db.people.find({name : "My Name"})
db.people.find({name : "My Name"}, {name : 1, place :1})
This will not return anything, but will not raise an error either :
db.people.find({first_name : "My Name"})
This will match the above document, but you will have only the default "_id" property on the returned document.
db.people.find({name : "My Name"}, {first_name : 1, location :1})
print('\n--->', Object.getOwnPropertyNames(db.users.findOne())
.toString()
.replace(/,/g, '\n---> ') + '\n');
---> _id
---> firstName
---> lastName
---> email
---> password
---> terms
---> confirmed
---> userAgent
---> createdAt
This is an incomplete solution because it doesn't give you the exact types, but useful for a quick view.
const doc = db.collectionName.findOne();
for (x in doc) {
print(`${x}: ${typeof doc[x]}`)
};
If you're OK with running a Map / Reduce, you can gather all of the possible document fields.
Start with this post.
The only problem here is that you're running a Map / Reduce on which can be resource intensive. Instead, as others have suggested, you'll want to look at the code that writes the actual data.
Just because the database doesn't have a schema doesn't mean that there is no schema. Generally speaking the schema information will be in the code.
I wrote a small mongo shell script that may help you.
https://gist.github.com/hkasera/9386709
Let me know if it helps.
You can use a UI tool mongo compass for mongoDb. This shows all the fields in that collection and also shows the variation of data in it.
If you are using NodeJS and want to get the all the field names using the API request, this code works for me-
let arrayResult = [];
db.findOne().exec(function (err, docs)){
if(err)
//show error
const JSONobj = JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(docs));
for(let key in JSONobj) {
arrayResult.push(key);
}
return callback(null, arrayResult);
}
The arrayResult will give you entire field/ column names
Output-
[
"_id",
"emp_id",
"emp_type",
"emp_status",
"emp_payment"
]
Hope this works for you!
Consider you have collection called people and you want to find the fields and it's data-types. you can use below query
function printSchema(obj) {
for (var key in obj) {
print( key, typeof obj[key]) ;
}
};
var obj = db.people.findOne();
printSchema(obj)
The result of this query will be like below,
you can use Object.keys like in JavaScript
Object.keys(db.movies.findOne())