Implementing Soft Delete in Mongoose
Aug 7, 2022
A soft delete means setting an isDeleted flag on the document to mark a document as deleted, rather than actually deleting the document. This means you can keep the document for future analysis.
const mongoose = require('mongoose'); const testSchema = new mongoose.Schema({ name: String, isDeleted: Boolean });Using Query Middleware
You can use middleware to filter out documents that have isDeleted: true, so Mongoose only returns documents that don't have isDeleted: true.
const mongoose = require('mongoose'); const testSchema = new mongoose.Schema({ name: String, isDeleted: { type: Boolean, defaults: false } }); testSchema.pre('find', function() { this.where({ isDeleted: false }); }); testSchema.pre('findOne', function() { this.where({ isDeleted: false }); }); const Test = mongoose.model('Test', testSchema); async function run() { await mongoose.connect('mongodb://localhost:27017'); await mongoose.connection.dropDatabase(); await Test.create({ name: 'Test' }); await Test.create({ name: 'HiddenTest', isDeleted: true }); // Only returns `Test` document, not `HiddenTest` const docs = await Test.find(); } run(); Want to become your team's MongoDB expert? "Mastering Mongoose" distills 8 years of hard-earned lessons building Mongoose apps at scale into 153 pages. That means you can learn what you need to know to build production-ready full-stack apps with Node.js and MongoDB in a few days. Get your copy! 
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