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Day 95 - BEGIN Shawshank Redemption, another query population hurdle

23 May 2017 100daysofwriting · king · mongoose · movies · population

UNFULFILLED POTENTIAL

If you have seen any trailer of The Circle (2017), you will know that this is the thing that Emma Watson’s character is most scared of. I just finished watching Good Will (Goodwill?) Hunting. That movie is the portrayal of unfulfilled potential. The ending is good, in my opinion though, the movie is over rated generally.

I have gone through 2 pages of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. It’s pretty easy reading (after that nightmarish historical mystery book, I bet anything with actual people walking around the place would be easy reading) and I know who Andy Dufresne is. Fair enough, more updates soon.

I went back and had a look at the “Should we send a notification?” flow chart that was recently tweeted by someone at Slack. It was a quip at how people say that “They could build X on a weekend”, X being anything like Facebook, Twitter, Slack etc. i.e. Deceptively simple products that have had a lot of thought put into their design, but no one acknowledges them. Worst of all, even other engineers don’t.

Another query population hurdle that I ran into was the population of an array of Strings, which are a unique field in another collection. Let me explain:

Person: {
  username: {
    type: String,
    unique: true,
    required: true
  }
}

Comment: { ...
  usernames: {
    type: [String]
  }
}

I have read the mongoose query population document several times but this particular case it seems hasn’t been addressed. If it were an array of ObjectIds, of course it would be a simple populate('usernames') addition to the query.

Virtuals was something that I tried to look into but that again serves another purpose altogether. I will keep looking but I think mongoose doesn’t support something like this right now.

POST #95 is OVER

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