Database modelling (mongoDB)

Question

I am trying to model a database for a fitness app. Currently the 4 main entities are as follows:

Exercise	User	Workout	UserWorkout
id	id	id	id
name	email	name	userId (fk)
body_part	name	description	workoutId (fk)
category	password	level	date
	age	exerciseIds (fk)	time_taken

The app will have default workouts as well as default exercises.

I would like the user to be able to add their own custom workouts/exercises that only they can see (in addition to the default ones) but I'm not sure on how to best structure the data?

Rafael Freitas · Accepted Answer · 2021-07-15 18:20:22Z

1

Kris, MongoDB is a schemaless database, what makes it really flexible when it comes down to data modelling. There are different ways of achieving what you described, the one I would recommend would be adding nested documents to the user document if they belong to it. You would have something like this:

User {
  firstName: ...,
  lastName: ...,
  age: ...,
  weight: ...,
  exercises: [
     // User's exercise objects
  ],
  workout: [
     // User's workout objects
  ],
}

This way you can easily have access to information related to the user and avoid using expensive operations like $lookup or querying the database multiple times.

To handle the default exercises/workouts you can have a property in the respective objects like isDefault: true.

answered Jul 15, 2021 at 18:20

Rafael Freitas

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1 Comment

Kris Gergov Over a year ago

Hi Rafael, thanks for your response. One reason why I did not embed the documents was that I would have to repeat the default exercises/workouts for each user. That is a lot of the same data.

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