In my database, every article has its own 6-digit identifying number (in addition to id). Every comment belongs to one of the articles. My question is, how to query comments knowing only the article number, but not the article's id?

controllers/fetch-comments.js:

const Article = require('../models/article')
const User = require('../models/user');
const Comment = require('../models/comment');

module.exports = async function (req, res) {
  try {
    let { article_number, articleId } = req.body
    let filter;
    console.log(article_number)
    /* Here is my failed attempt: */
    if (article_number) filter = { 'article.number': article_number };
    if (articleId) filter = { 'article': articleId };
    let projection = null
    let options = null
    let comments = await Comment.find(filter, projection, options).populate('author', 'username fullname').lean()
    return res.status(200).send(comments)
  } catch (error) {
    console.log("error on getting comments: " + error.message);
    return res.status(500).send('Server side error');
  }
}

models/article.js:

const mongoose = require('mongoose');

const Schema = mongoose.Schema;

const articleSchema = new Schema({
    author: { type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'User', required: true },
    title: { type: String, required: true },
    content: { type: String, required: true },
    coverPhotoUrl: { type: String, required: false },
    number: { type: Number, required: true }, // number is public id for address bar 
    createdAt: { type: Date, required: true },
    category: { type: String, required: false },
    fake: { type: Boolean, required: false },
});

module.exports = mongoose.model('Article', articleSchema);

models/comment.js:

const mongoose = require('mongoose');

const Schema = mongoose.Schema;

const commentSchema = new Schema({
    author: { type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'User', required: true },
    content: { type: String, required: true },
    createdAt: { type: Date, required: true },
    article: { type: Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Article', required: true }
});

module.exports = mongoose.model('Comment', commentSchema);

Please do not suggest doing 2 queries intead of one, I already know how to do that.