Meteor: Preferred method to selectively expose app-wide collection metadata to client? (i.e. for dashboard)

Question

I'd like to implement an admin dashboard in my Meteor app, displaying data like user count, currently logged-in users, and metadata (counts, plots, etc.) from other collections.

Since my existing publications only expose each user's own "stuff" on the client side, and the users publication only exposes the logged-in user for security, I figure I'm going to need some new interfaces.

What would be the best way to collect and expose this data to the client conditionally, if a user with admin rights is logged-in? I'm thinking either a group of methods to provide each displayed parameter, or a dashboard method that collects all the parameters and returns them as a big JSON object... Is there a preferred way?

Answer 1

Any of your proposed solutions would work; I think it depends on the performance characteristics of each, which is probably something you would need to explore on your own.

Offhand, it seems like if you return these in a reactive monolithic JSON object, depending how you structure it you might have to re-run the whole calculation each time something changes, which would probably be inefficient. Keeping the methods separate seems like it would be better, since you'd only be re-running calculations on changed data.

You might check out the simple:reactive-method package or Discover Meteor pattern for using a Meteor method in a template helper to make that a bit easier. The pattern I would suggest would be something like:

// lib JS
Meteor.methods({
  userCount: function() { 
    var user = Meteor.user();
    if (user && user.admin) { 
      return Meteor.users.find().count();
    }
  }
});

// Client JS
Template.dashboard.helpers({
  userCount: function() { 
    return ReactiveMethod.call('userCount');
  },
  isAdmin: function() { return Meteor.user().admin; }
});

// HTML 
<template name='dashboard'>
  {{#if isAdmin}}
     There are {{userCount}} users.
     ... <!-- any other stuff you want -->
  {{/if}}
</template>