[SOLVED] Modelling tournament brackets in MongoDB

Modelling tournament brackets in MongoDB

I've been experimenting with MongoDB in order to move some parts of an app to it. I'm thinking a document-based db like mongodb would be a nice fit for tournament brackets but I'm having sort of a hard time coming up with a suitable model. (still trying to break free from RDBMS dogma)

Anyone have any ideas for a good way to model Single AND Double-elimination tournament brackets?

Solution

Both tournament variation basically come down to each match either resulting in one of these options :

Player wins and advances to next round
Player wins and wins the tournament
Player loses and exits the tournament
Player loses and advances to loser bracket

So, if you model it so that you have a collection of matches with a schema like :

{
_id :.., <- match id
players:[playerId1, playerId2],
resultForWinner: <either "WINS_TOURNAMENT" or match id of next match>
resultForLoser: <either "EXIT_TOURNAMENT" or match id of loser bracket match
}

You can compose both types of tournament brackets with this schema and reuse your tournament logic without making a distinction between the two other than bracket setup.