Should relationship IDs be stored in Mongo as BSON ObjectID instead of string?

[Moodycomputer]

When saving a relationship field, should the ID of the target record be stored as a BSON ObjectID instead of a string? This seems to be the recommended best practice from MongoDB, and is the practice adopted by Mongoose for document population.

Today, this field configuration—

{
  slug: 'example-collection',
  fields: [
    {
      name: 'owner',
      type: 'relationship',
      relationTo: 'users',
      hasMany: false,
    }
  ]
}

Saves to the database as—

{
  "owner": "6031ac9e1289176380734024"
}

Under this suggestion, that same configuration would save as

{
  "owner": ObjectID("6031ac9e1289176380734024")
}

This would allow for sibling systems to access the Payload-connected database in a more standardized way, and allow for operations utilizing ObjectID helper functions within the database.

[jacobsfletch]

Hey @Moodycomputer! We've actually built a plugin to do exactly this, check it out: https://github.com/payloadcms/plugin-relationship-object-ids. The instructions in the README should be pretty explanatory but let me know if you have any questions.

[georgiev-anton]

Hello. Plugin not work with PayloadCMS v.2 (

payloadcms/plugin-relationship-object-ids#2

[Moodycomputer]

@jacobsfletch This is exactly what I'm looking for, thank you!

Out of curiosity, why is this method not the default?

[jmikrut]

Because we have to be able to store custom text IDs and custom number IDs. Early on we made a decision to just store relationships as strings to make this all easier and more predictable but in retrospect, I think we could have probably just kept object IDs for sure. If this could become the default again in a future version.

[Moodycomputer]

That makes a lot of sense, the flexibility helps in some cases for sure. Thanks again!

[georgiev-anton]

@jacobsfletch Hi. help me please, how to fix bug plugin-relationship-object-ids payloadcms/plugin-relationship-object-ids#2 ?

[olivier5741]

Hi, it's hard to combine the following technologies on top of mongoDB because Payload does not support ObjectId relationships. The plugin is deprecated and I tried a pull request but there were issues : see payloadcms/plugin-relationship-object-ids#5

• Gatsbyjs : supports string and objectId
• MongoDB Atlas Charts : support objectId only, need to turn string into objectId in the aggregation pipeline
• PayloadCMS : supports string only, plugin for supporting objectId is deprecated
• Hasura : supports objectId only, didn't find a work around so far ... (I just started integrating it)

I'm using PayloadCMS over 30 collections with many relationships and this is the only thing that's in my way. All the rest is super smooth ;).

[olivier5741]

This is the best to make every tool happy. A string id for payload under ${concept.name} and an object id under ${concept.name} + "Id" for the others ... Overkill but effective :)