SimpleSchema Relations

This package aims to provide an easy way to define relations between different collections by utilizing aldeed:simple-schema and reywood:publish-composite.

WARNING: This is proof of concept and haven't been tested on production yet.

Installation

At the moment you can install the package by cloning the repo to local packages folder and then running meteor add mfactory:simple-schema-relations. The package isn't published on Atmosphere yet.

Usage

You can define one-to-one and one-to-many relations using joinById property in your schema, e.g.:

Posts = new Mongo.Collection('Posts');

PostsSchema = new SimpleSchema({
  title: {
    type: String
  },

  content: {
    type: String
  },

  owner: {
    type: String,
    regEx: SimpleSchema.RegEx.Id,
    autoValue: function () {
      if (this.isInsert) {
        return Meteor.userId();
      }
    },

    joinById: Meteor.users
  },

  collaborators: {
    type: [String],
    regEx: SimpleSchema.RegEx.Id,

    joinById: Meteor.users
  }
})

That defined schema can be used to publish data from the server with Meteor.publishAndJoin, e.g:

Meteor.publishAndJoin('myPosts', function () {
  return Posts.find({ owner: this.userId });
});

When you subscribe to this publication owner and collaborators documents will be automatically published by searching Meteor.users collection with _id field. If you don't want to publish some fields (like collabolators in following example), you can do it same way as with "ordinary" meteor publication, e.g:

Meteor.publishAndJoin('myPosts', function () {
  return Posts.find({ owner: this.userId }, { fields: { collabolators: 0 } });
});

On the client you can use Collection.findAndJoin method which will join the different documents into one, e.g (assuming that you subscribed to myPosts before):

var myPosts = Posts.findAndJoin({ owner: Meteor.userId() });
// [
//    {
//        title: "Hello World",
//        owner: {
//            _id: "4YhECJMSdo54ZFH3d",
//            emails: Array[1],
//            services: Object
//        },
//        collaborators: [
//            {
//              _id: "x2jfSxPokHdQWd5Xf",
//                emails: Array[1],
//                services: Object
//            },
//            ...
//        ]
//      },
//      ...
// ]

TODO

• Tests
• Publish and join fields of children docs. Currently only collection fields are published and joined
• Allow to specify which fields of joined documents to publish/find
  • Exclude fields
  • Include fields
• Allow to specify the custom find method on schema and publication level
• Extra join methods (findByField)
• Think of better names
  • Meteor.publishSchema -> Meteor.publishRelations || Meteor.publishAndJoin ??
  • findById -> joinById ??
• Custom children properties in publication method (see reywood:publish-composite)
• Return "normal" cursor to have count() and observe() etc. (Low priority)