Meteor + MongoDB: Database pattern

Question

I'm new to Meteor and trying to figure out how to best design this database to store and publish data. I thought it would make sense to use these packages:

https://github.com/aldeed/meteor-autoform

https://github.com/aldeed/meteor-simple-schema

https://github.com/iron-meteor/iron-router

I'd have a collection for the list of courses to be listed on a page:

Courses = new Mongo.Collection("courses");

Courses.attachSchema(new SimpleSchema({
  title: {
    type: String,
    label: "Title",
    max: 200
  },
  comingSoon: {
    type: boolean,
    label: "Coming Soon?"
  },
  description: {
    type: String,
    label: "Course Description",
    max: 200
  }
}));

And a collection for the lessons inside each course:

Lessons = new Mongo.Collection("lessons");
Lessons.attachSchema(new SimpleSchema({
  title: {
    type: String,
    label: "Title",
    max: 200
  },
  video: {
    type: String,
    label: "Link to video"
  },
}));

and have a admin page to create new courses/lessons using the autoform package.

My questions is how would I link the course to the lessons related to it? Would I use iron:router to listen to parameters in the url and query both collections and create the template layout?

Answer 1

You should have a field corresponding to the Lesson / Course relation, similarly as in traditional databases.

For example:

Lessons.attachSchema(new SimpleSchema({
  ...
  courseId: {type: String}, // ID of the corresponding course
}));

or:

Courses.attachSchema(new SimpleSchema({
  ...
  lessonIds: {type: [String]}, // Array of IDs of lessons
}));