Is there a way to only return fields defined within a Mongoose schema?

no need to define another schema to get specific property from a collection. Just specify which properties you want to return in find() function as projection option.

Schema.find(query,options,callbackFunction);

like:

person.find({},{name:1}, function(err, docs) {//used name:1 to return only name   if(error) {      return res.status(400).send({msg: "error"});   }   return res.status(200).send(docs);});

I have an idea of using "select: false" on the Reference schema. We still have to list/define all the related fields.

For example,

{   "name": "John",   "age": 25,   "gender": "male"}

var Person = mongoose.Schema({ "name": String, "age": Number, "gender": String}, {collection: "People");var PersonRef = mongoose.Schema({ "name": String, "age": { type: Number, select: false }, "gender": { type: String, select: false },} {collection: "People"});

But this method will only applicable (or useful) when the schema is relatively small for maintainability. If the schema grown bigger, then we will need to set select: false in both (or multiple schema) to avoid auto select in RefSchema.

I'm still looking for a better solution to handle this.