Accessing ref object without calling populate

[Tug]

Hello,

Is there a way to set and later access a reference object without calling populate ?

I have a large object, let's call it 'user' of type User which is kept in memory.

Now I have a schema which has a reference to a User object. It looks like this :

var Room = new mongoose.Schema({

        ...

        owner            : { type: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'User' },

});

when creating a new room referencing that user I can write :

var room = new Room({ owner: user });

or

var room = new Room({ owner: user._id });

and save it in database :

room.save(function(err) { ... });

This works.

Now I want to keep 'room' in memory and access the 'user' object from it.

I don't want to reload the whole user object from database by calling populate('owner').

I just want to write something like :

room.set('owner', user);

and not have the owner property be set to user._id

How can I do that ?

I have tried :

room._doc.owner = user;

but if I call room.save() after that the owner reference will be replaced by the whole user document.

Thanks.

[Aaron Heckmann]

Do not touch _doc. It's prone to break things.

You essentially need to cache the room and owner together in memory right? Maybe define a virtual getter/setter that handles storing/returning the user in some temporary place in memory. 

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@aaronheckmann

[Tug]

Thanks for your help Aaron.

I think that would have been great if there was a way to hack the room object for it to behave like I just called populate. Looking at the code it does not seem easily doable though.

I agree that a temporary dictionary plus some virtual getter/setter could do the job just fine but I am quite hesitant in breaking my code construct.

For now, I choosed to just set room._doc.streamer and make sure the room object is only read after that. What's the worst that could happen:D

[Tug]

Could a document.markNotModified method make sense ?