How to Populate not returning nulls

[Mauricio Mercado]

Hello,

I have the following schema

User {

_id

name

screencolor

username

}

Post {

_id

comment

author

replyTo

nextSibling

previousSibling

topReplies

}

Since Im saving an entire conversation, if a post has a replyTo (parent) attribute set, it will probably have either previous Sibling or next Sibling, and it might have top replies, but if it has no parent it will have no siblings.

Im doing the following query:

Post.find( { draft: false } ).sort({createdAt: -1})

  .populate({path: 'previousSibling nextSibling topReplies replyTo', select: '_id author'})

  .populate({path: 'author', select: 'username screencolor'})

  .exec(function(err, posts) {

    if(err){

      return next(new restify.ConflictError(err));

    }

    if (posts.length === 0) {

      return next(new restify.NotFoundError("No Posts Found"));

    } else {

      User.populate(posts, {path: 'previousSibling.author nextSibling.author topReplies.author replyTo.author', select: 'username name screencolor'}, function(err, docs) {

        res.json(200, docs);

        return next();

      });

    }

  });

};

Now its understandable from this post that the intended way that mongoose works is that populates returns null if the field requested does not return anything, but is there a way to not return null fields at all, or return something else?

Thank you!

[Mauricio Mercado]

Im using mongoose 3.6.16

[Aaron Heckmann]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 8:14 AM, Mauricio Mercado <m...@maumercado.com> wrote:

Now its understandable from this post that the intended way that mongoose works is that populates returns null if the field requested does not return anything, but is there a way to not return null fields at all, or return something else?

There is not.

--
Aaron

@aaronheckmann