add_publish_and_subscribe.md

Publish and Subscribe to Notes

TODO: wait for all subs to be ready, need a better loading strategy - might be a blog post and something I can use for the talk

Currently we are automatically publishing data from the server. That's fine for prototyping purposes, but for a real app, we want control what is published and what the client subscribes to.

Remove the 'autopublish' package

meteor remove autopublish

You should now see that there are no notes being displayed.

Our notes are still in the database. However, we now need to explicitly publish and subscribe to our notes.

Add a Notes Publication

/imports/collections/server/publications.js

import { Meteor } from 'meteor/meteor'
import { Notes } from '../notes'

const
  notesListFields = {
    title: 1,
    updatedAt: 1
  }

Meteor.publish('notes.list', function() {
  return Notes.find({}, { fields: notesListFields})
})

TODO: change meteor methods naming convention to be consistent. TODO: discuss - why are we not using arrow function?

Why the server directory? Why only publish certain fields?

Import to the server on startup

/imports/startup/server/index.js

...
import '/imports/collections/server/publications'

Subscribe to the notes publication

/imports/components/containers/homepage_container.js

export default createContainer(() => {

	const 
	  sub = Meteor.subscribe('notes.list')
	  ,
	  notes = sub.ready()? Note.find({}, { sort: { updatedAt: -1}}).fetch() : []
	 ,
   ...
}, App)

TODO: explain sub.ready() and use of empty array

Your notes should now re-appear in your browser.