documents

Documents are the core objects in Mongoid and any object that is to be persisted to the database must include Mongoid::Document. The representation of a Document in MongoDB is a BSON object that is very similar to a Ruby hash or JSON object. Documents can be stored in their own collections in the database, or can be embedded in other Documents n levels deep.

storage

Mongoid by default stores documents in a collection that is the pluralized form of the class name. For the following Person class, the collection the document would get stored in would be named people.

class Person
  include Mongoid::Document
end

NOTE: Model class name cannot end with "s", because it will be considered as the pluralized form of the word. For example Status would be considered as the plural form of Statu, which will cause a few known problems.

This is a limitation of the ActiveSupport::Inflector#classify which Mongoid uses to convert from filenames and collection names to class names. You can overcome this by specifying a custom inflection rule for your model class. For example, the following code will take care of the model named Status

ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
  inflect.singular("status", "status")
end

The collection for the model's documents can be changed at the class level if you would like them persisted elsewhere.

class Person
  include Mongoid::Document
  store_in :citizens
end

When a document is stored in the database the ruby object will get serialized into BSON and have a structure like so:

{
  "_id" : ObjectId("4d3ed089fb60ab534684b7e9"),
  "title" : "Sir",
  "name" : {
    "_id" : ObjectId("4d3ed089fb60ab534684b7ff"),
    "first_name" : "Durran"
  },
  "addresses" : [
    {
      "_id" : ObjectId("4d3ed089fb60ab534684b7e0"),
      "city" : "Berlin",
      "country" : "Deutschland"
    }
  ]
}