Using a selfdefined ObjectId and avoiding double entries in Mongoose - mongodb

Question

I am getting JSON objects through an external API in node.js and want to store them in MongoDB. I defined a model like this:
var Product = new Schema({
id: ObjectId,
name: String});
And now I'm trying to store an object:
JSONProduct = { id: 1234, name: 'The Foo Bar' };
product = new Product(JSONProduct);
product.save();
The object is stored fine in the "products" collection, but the id from the JSONProduct is replaced by a MongoDB created value:
{ "id" : ObjectId("119894980274616772006500"), "name" : "The Foo Bar" }
The main reason why I want to use my Product id over the MongoDB created one is, that I want to prevent duplicate entries for products. I get the JSON Product objects through a cronjob triggered call on an external API, including already existing ones. Maybe there is another, better way to do this?

Answer 1

You are defining an field as an ObjectID, but you are assigning a Number to it. To create an ObjectID you need to do something like:
new ObjectId('something');
However, in your case this is probably not the best idea. Define your model like this:
var Product = new Schema({
external_id: {type: Number, unique: true},
name: {type: String},
});
You can specify unique on a field to create a unique index for that field.

Answer 2

In the question you've mentioned,
The object is stored fine in the "products" collection, but the id from the JSONProduct is replaced by a MongoDB created value:
{ "id" : ObjectId("119894980274616772006500"), "name" : "The Foo Bar" }
But I think the it is created as:
{ "_id" : ObjectId("119894980274616772006500"), "name" : "The Foo Bar" }
Also, you can pass in your product id to field by name "_id", then mongo will not create any separate IDs and it'll not accept duplicate values and it'll have indexing automatically for that field.
But make sure you push unique values of product id to _id.