CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptmeteorecmascript-6
Reason
Reason

Reputation: 1430

Meteor, chaining method calls

I have a Meteor method that tries to manipulate the database, and if successful, calls an async method. I would like to be able to call this method and return the result of the async call or the error from the database manipulation.

This is (roughly) my code on the server:

Meteor.methods({
    'data.update'(id, data) {
        Collection.update({id_: id}, {$set: {data: data}}, error => {
            if (error) {
                // Have method return Meteor error for DB-failure
            } else {
                callAsync(id, (error, res) => {
                    if (error) {
                        // Have method return Meteor error for async call failure
                    } else {
                        // Have method return success(res)
                    }
                })
            }
        })
    }
});

I have read about Futures and Promises, but I'm new to the concepts and I'm not sure when to use what. Preferably I'm looking for a solution that does not rely on any third party libraries outside of Meteor/ES6. Bonus (related) question: what is normally returned after a database manipulation that let's me attach a callback to a method?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 348

Answers (2)

Ankit
Ankit

Reputation: 1128

According to docs

On the server, if you don’t provide a callback, then update blocks until the database acknowledges the write, or throws an exception if something went wrong. If you do provide a callback, update returns immediately. Once the update completes, the callback is called with a single error argument in the case of failure, or a second argument indicating the number of affected documents if the update was successful.

So, if the update is successful, the number of documents affected is returned. In case of insert , the _id of the inserted document is returned.

You can simply pass a third argument to the update function as mentioned.

For promise implementation, you can use Meteor.wrapAsync method. You may also want to look at Meteor.bindEnvironment to achieve that, if you need to pass the state of instance variables too.

Upvotes: 3

hwillson
hwillson

Reputation: 1399

You can look into using Promises, but there is another fairly standard way of handling something like this within the Meteor ecosystem. You can use Meteor.wrapAsync to convert your asynchronous callback based function into a Fibers based version. This will then let you leverage return values and exceptions. Here's a quick example:

1) Let's say we have an internal function somewhere called increaseLifetimeWidgetCount that increases our lifetime widget count in the database somewhere, then calls a callback with either an error or the newly updated lifetime count:

function increaseLifetimeWidgetCount(callback) {
  // ...
  // increase the lifetime widget count in the DB somewhere, and 
  // get back the updated widget count, or an error.
  // ...
  const fakeError = null;
  const fakeLifetimeWidgetCount = 1000;
  return callback(fakeError, fakeLifetimeWidgetCount);
}

2) Let's say we then have a simple Method defined that will create a new Widget in our database, call our internal increaseLifetimeWidgetCount function, then return the newly updated lifetime widget count. Since we want to return the updated lifetime widget count, we'll wrap our callback based increaseLifetimeWidgetCount function in a Meteor.wrapAsync call, and return the result:

Meteor.methods({
  newWidget(data) {
    check(data, Object);
    Widgets.insert(data);
    const increaseLifetimeWidgetCountFiber =
      Meteor.wrapAsync(increaseLifetimeWidgetCount);
    const lifetimeWidgetCount = increaseLifetimeWidgetCountFiber();
    return lifetimeWidgetCount;
  }
});

3) We can then call the newWidget Method from our client, with an asynchronous callback, and handle either the returned error or returned lifetime widget count:

Meteor.call('newWidget', { 
  name: 'Test Widget 1' 
}, (error, result) => { 
  // Do something with the error or lifetime widget count result ...
  console.log(error, result);
});

Upvotes: 1

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