Best Practices for handling Meteor.users relationships to Collections

Hi all – fairly new to Meteor here.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading articles and looking over packages to figure out the best way to handle something like this…

Basically, my app has accounts-facebook exclusively for user auth, and instead of allowing client side modification to Meteor.users, I created a UserProfile collection. The goal of it is to allow the user to edit their userprofiles doc in the database, but Meteor.users will never be touched.

When a user is created, I’m calling a hook from matb33:collection-hooks:

Meteor.users.after.insert(function(userId, doc) { UserProfile.insert({ userProfileId: doc._id, firstName: doc.firstName, lastName: doc.lastName, email: doc.email, userGender: doc.gender, }); console.log("Success. Created UserProfile."); });

The concept I was going after was using userProfileId and Meteor.users._id to define the relationship – I haven’t been able to figure out how to get the client side to edit the UserProfile yet though. I should also note it’s actually working really well to build a userProfile automatically from the defined schema – I’m using Accounts.onCreateUser() to move these things from user.services.facebook.* out of nesting and then calling the hook.

Few questions about this:

1.) Is this the best way to make a relationship between Users and other collections (like my userprofiles collection, or is there a general practice that I can’t seem to find?

2.) Does anyone have any examples or public repo’s using both aldeed:simple-schema and emmerge:graviton? I understand ORM’s are somewhat debatable with Meteor, but I’d love to see a super easy way to build relationships and how everyone else out there handles this.

Thanks again – lmk if I’m not being clear enough in my example. I would really love to know the best practices involved here and what the publications might look like…

-Ryan


EDIT:

So I figured out the secure means of publishing userprofiles, courtesy of Meteorchef’s guide here:

  var user = this.userId,
          profileId = UserProfile.find({ "userProfileId" : user });
  if (profileId){
        return profileId;
  }
  return this.ready();
});```

If any other newbs need to understand the concepts of pub/sub and document association, highly recommend reading that. And definitely read Josh Owen's security series:
[Meteor Security 101](http://joshowens.me/meteor-security-101/)
[Meteor Security 201](http://joshowens.me/meteor-security-201/)

Still wondering how collection associations are best handled and how they're in practice though! :slight_smile:

-Ryan

http://grapher.cultofcoders.com is the answer to relational meteor