Question

This question is ‘similar’ to this but I’m asking for alternative (if it exists).

I have create a db Nums with a collection numbers in the mongo shell.
Using mongoose as the ODM I want to access that collection and list the numbers.

var mongoose = require('mongoose')
  , Schema = mongoose.Schema;

mongoose.connect('mongodb://localhost/Nums');
mongoose.model('numbers', new Schema({value: Number}));

mongoose.connection.on('open', function(ref) {
  console.log('Connected to mongo server.');
});

mongoose.connection.on('error', function(err) {
  console.log('Could not connect to mongo server!');
  console.log(err);
});

var nums = mongoose.model('numbers');
nums.find({}, function(err, data) {console.log(err, data, data.length);});

In order to access an already created database/collections do I always have to go through a mongoose.model and new Schema calls? Can this step be bypassed?

Even though this step has to be written once, it seems that if I have a very large schema this will be very tedious just to pull out a db/collection from mongo.

Is there a work around for this or this is the only path?

Answer 1

After some experimenting the answer is “you have to specify the schema and model, but it’s not that bad”.

For instance, I could of done:

mongoose.connect('mongodb://localhost/Nums');
mongoose.model('numbers', new Schema());

but as @JohnnyHK mentions you miss out on the field type casting.

Also, suppose that you have a large schema, you can specify what you want to type-cast:

mongoose.connect('mongodb://localhost/Nums');
mongoose.model('numbers', new Schema({username: String, address: String}));

I only type-casted two fields.