A collection within a collection

Question

I just wanted to query everyone's best practice for doing this.

• User has multiple notebooks within their account. Each of these is a record in the database.

• There are multiple users.

• The notebook has different sections to fill in. There are also sections which are lists. The user needs to be able to add extra items to these lists (almost as if it were it's own collection).

• There may be a lot of users, and I want all their notebooks in the same collection.

How would you approach this? I'm using Simple Schema and Aldeed Collection. I imagine that each list within the notebook would be an array, but how would I make it that the user can set how many items / add new items to the list?

Interested to know people's thoughts!

Answer 1

This is a MongoDB data modeling question primarily (see also schema design), but there are a few things to keep in mind with Meteor:

• read up on reactive joins at Discover Meteor and Gentle Node
• for reactivity to work at its best, you want collections instead of arrays
• that means you'll need to perform the equivalent of joins with MongoDB, so have a look at reactive join packages, this post about evaluating them, and Meteor.publish: publish collection which depends on other collection

Make sure to vote up this card on the Meteor roadmap to get native reactive joins.