Passing mongoose model to ejs and rendering in script tag

Question

I'm returning my model to my view something like this:

User.findOneById('xxx', function(err, result){
    res.render('viewName', {user: result});
}

Then, on my view, I have a script block, that I'm trying to assign the user to a variable:

<script id="foundBusiness" type="text/javascript">
    var user = <%-user%>
</script>

This renders as follows as the HTML

var user = { __v: 0,
  _id: 5315b7b9caaf52e624070002,
  firstName: 'Alex',
  lastName: 'Brown',
  password: '$2a$10$Zs/6JmB3Rq5dddHvjZNUse9vl.8z3hJO.LUGBqMEE.vBMk4lVuav.'}

My issue is around the _id field
This is obviously not valid Javascript, and as such, an error occurs:

SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

From the horse's mouth

ObjectIds contain the raw MongoDB binary and don't work with templating so we provide the id convenience method to convert them to hexstrings

https://github.com/LearnBoost/mongoose/issues/548

One possible solution -

User.findOneById('xxx', function(err, result){
    result._id = result._id.toHexString();
    res.render('viewName', {user: result});
}

I think assigning it to result.id would also work.

result._id = result.id;