Mongoose deep populate with self-referencing children - angularjs

Question

This is working code to populate my Locations collection, which can have self-referencing child Locations. It uses mongoose-deep-populate. But I need to add another ".childLocations" to my path variable for every extra level of depth that I want to handle. Is there a better way to accomplish unknown depths of self-references?
I have this node.js code.
var path = 'childLocations.childLocations.childLocations.childLocations.childLocations.childLocations';
exports.list = function(req, res) {
Location.find().sort('-created').populate('user', 'displayName').deepPopulate(path).exec(function(err, locations) {
console.log(locations);
if (err) {
return res.status(400).send({
message: errorHandler.getErrorMessage(err)
});
} else {
res.jsonp(locations);
}
});
};
Here is the schema:
var LocationSchema = new Schema({
name: {
type: String,
default: '',
required: 'Please fill Location name',
trim: true
},
projectsExecutedHere: Boolean,
childLocations: [{
type: Schema.ObjectId,
ref: 'Location'
}],
created: {
type: Date,
default: Date.now
},
user: {
type: Schema.ObjectId,
ref: 'User'
}
});
mongoose.model('Location', LocationSchema);
var deepPopulate = require('mongoose-deep-populate');
LocationSchema.plugin(deepPopulate);
----------
Before trying mongoose-deep-populate, I had seen that mongoose 3.6 had support for deep population, but I could only make it go one level deep. This is what I tried:
Location.find().sort('-created').populate('user', 'displayName').populate('childLocations').exec(function (err, locations) {
Location.populate(locations, {path: 'childLocations.childLocations'},
function (err, data) {
console.log(err);
if (err) {
return res.status(400).send({
message: errorHandler.getErrorMessage(err)
});
} else {
res.jsonp(locations);
}
}
);
For the path I also tried 'childLocations.childLocations.childLocations' but it didn't populate it at all.