Here’s my experience with SailsJS, Waterline and MongoDB native queries. I like SailsJS and Waterline very much but there’s also room for improvement when things get serious.

There’s limitation in current Waterline that one cannot limit the fields in the output when MongoDB is used. Also the aggregation options are limited with Waterline. MongoDB on the other hand is very-very powerful database engine and once you learn how to aggregate then the possibilities seem endless.

My usecase is that I have to use native queries instead of Waterline’s but I also want the retrieved models have all those nice “instance methods” of Waterline model instances like “model.save()”. This example also gives you overview how to use native queries, aggregation.

So here’s very short guide to this. I hope it helps to save a couple of hours for other guys like me (who spent that time to figure it out:)).

Note! It uses another excellent, wonderful, genius etc pattern called Promises.