Question

Let’s say you have boxes with items. Each item may be in more than one box, so every item has an array of ids to boxes that the item lies in.

childA= {…boxIds: [‘000001’, ‘000002’, ‘000003’]…}

In mongodb you can say child.find({boxIds:'000002'}) to get childA and every other children where 000002 is in the array of boxIds.
This is what I tried in mongoose (coffeescript):

  data = boxIds: box._id
  Child.find data, (err, children) -> doSomething

I always get an empty result though. I can’t find the problem or is this type of query not supported by mongoose?

EDIT

Child = new mongoose.Schema
  ...
  boxIds: Array
  ...

box._id is the normal mongodb id string

example query in mongodb: db.child.find( {boxIds: '50bb5d10ba1e232401000002'} )

result: ......., "boxIds" : [ "50bb5d10ba1e232401000002" ], .....

EDIT2

Could it be that _id is not a string?

Answer 1

The problem is that box._id is an ObjectId, but the boxIds array field of Child contains strings.

Try this instead:

data = boxIds: box._id.toString()
Child.find data, (err, children) -> doSomething

The other option would be to define boxIds as a string array in the schema and then Mongoose will do the necessary casting for you:

Child = new mongoose.Schema
  ...
  boxIds: [String]
  ...