Meteor - sending a message to all clients

Question

I am building an application using Meteor.js with flashMessage to display informative messages for the user. Currently the message is tied to click events of individual users, but I want to display that message for all users.

Is there a way of using Meteor and flashMessages to accomplish this? Or another package should be used?

Cheers.

Answer 1

There are probably multiple ways, but here is one, using a collection of messages:

Common:

Messages = new Meteor.Collection('messages');

Client:

if (Meteor.isClient()) {
    Meteor.subscribe('messages');
    var msgs = Messages.find();
    msgs.observeChanges({
        added: function(id, obj) {
            FlashMessages.sendInfo(obj.text);
        }
    });
}

Server:

if (Meteor.isServer()) {
    Meteor.publish('messages', function() {
        return Messages.find();
    });
}

And then just insert messages like {text: "my text"} into the Messages collection and they should be displayed on all clients.

PS: You may want to remove the inserted messages again after a while, or else any newly arriving client will be shown all past messages. Alternatively you could just subscribe to recent messages.