How do I paginate combined results in mongoose?

Question

I have a User model, and two different associated models Profile , WorkProfile . The profile model contains general info about the user line name, email, home address etc, workprofile contains details like current office address, office phone, office email etc The user model stores the objectID of these two and refers to them with profile and workprofile keys.

Now what I am trying to build is an advanced search on user model based on the fields in these associated models. One way I see is to query them separately and then use _.concat to join the results. But the problem with that is I can't implement skip or limit on the final result to get proper pagination. What would be the best way to do this with proper pagination?

Answer 1

Instead of using ref on profile and workprofile You can add it to user like bellow, this allows for using find method with profile.name , etc.

var ProfileSchema = mongoose.Schema({
    name: String
});

var WorkProfileSchema = mongoose.Schema({
    email: String
});

var UserSchema = mongoose.Schema({
    profile: ProfileSchema,
    work_profile: WorkProfileSchema 
});    

var User = mongoose.model('User', UserSchema);

var user = new User({
    profile: {name: 'Molda'},
    work_profile: { email: 'my@email.com'}
});

user.save(function(err, u) {

    User.findOne({'profile.name':'Molda'},function(err, user) {

        console.log('user', user);

    })

});

or even use simple objects

var UserSchema = mongoose.Schema({
    profile: {
        name: String
    },
    work_profile: {
        email: String
    }
});

This might not be always good idea but it's possible.