I am welcoming the new change in 1.0.4 that brings a subscribe method to Templates which works exactly as Meteor.subscribe and automatically stops the subscription when the template is destroyed. This should make for much cleaner code.
However, how am I supposed to use this new feature when I am connecting to a remote server via DDP.connect?
Good point! That is an oversight in the current API - we should add an option to use a different connection.
For now, as a workaround, you can use regular Meteor.subscribe inside this.autorun, which has a very similar effect. You won’t get the subscriptionsReady method, but it’s a start.
Could you file a feature request on GitHub for this?
I just went through the source and saw that in blaze/template.js it defines subscribe as this.view.subscribe, and in blaze/view.js Blaze.View.prototype.subscribe it actually checks in options for connection
Blaze.View.prototype.subscribe = function (args, options) {
var self = this;
options = {} || options;
self._errorIfShouldntCallSubscribe();
var subHandle;
if (options.connection) {
subHandle = options.connection.subscribe.apply(options.connection, args);
} else {
subHandle = Meteor.subscribe.apply(Meteor, args);
}
self.onViewDestroyed(function () {
subHandle.stop();
});
return subHandle;
};
so this tells me that I should be able to do the following in Template.created
Template.hello.created = function() [
this.subscribe('subscription', arg1, arg2, {connection: DDP.connect(url)}, function(){
console.log('successfully subscribed to subscription on '+url);
});
}
right?
And it does not work. Apparently creates a recursion of some sort and browser freezes
Exception from Tracker afterFlush function: Maximum call stack size exceeded
Meteor.remoteConnection = DDP.connect(url);
Template.hello.created = function() [
this.subscribe('subscription', arg1, arg2, {
connection: Meteor.remoteConnection,
onReady: function(){
console.log('successfully subscribed to subscription on '+url);
},
onError: function(err) {
console.log(err);
}
});
}
shows the error
Meteor.makeErrorType.errorClass {error: 404, reason: "Subscription not found", details: undefined, message: "Subscription not found [404]", errorType: "Meteor.Error"…}
but when I use Meteor.remoteConnection.subscribe('subscription') all works as expected
Try this:
this.view.subscribe(['subscription', arg1, arg2],
{ connection: Meteor.remoteConnection });
Basically we added it as an internal API to views, but made the API more extensible by taking the arguments as an array. I actually forgot we did this, but it was @glasser’s idea to address exactly this case.
Still no go. Doing it that way does not create an Error, but also doesn’t subscribe.
I filed an issue on github, Maybe it is a defect, and best case scenario a matter of documentation
Quick update on this issue. It is actually a bug and I have submitted a pull request with a fix.
Does anyone know what’s the status of this feature? I’ve just run into exactly the same problem.
Pull request successfully merged and closed
Yeah, but for some reason it’s not yet working in 1.1.0.3. I looked into the source code and the
options = {} || options;
snippet is still there 
Too bad. If I remember correctly, that was the only place I found that in the code and pointed out that it doesn’t work and changed it in my pull request …
Yeah, 1.2 has been taking a while, but we are doing our best. 1.1.0.3, as the small version change suggests, was only a fix for facebook login after they changed the API.