Populate mongo collection key referencing another collection (Meteor + React)

help
1

Hi guys!

Please consider the following:
I have an Items Mongo.Collection with all the available items of many suppliers. When a user (buyer) decides to open a new order, an OpenOrder is created. When an item is added to this open order, a new entry is inserted into the OpenOrderBody collection:

openorderitem = {
    _id: ...,
    amount: 3 (so user added this item 3 times),
    rowId: 1 (position in list),
    item: ITEM _ID IS HERE
}

The important key is the item key which references this exact item in the Items collection via its _id.
Is there some nice way to populate the item key on the server and send the populated OpenOrderBody to the client?
I already tried meteor-collection-helpers and meteor-publish-composite but both do not really do what I want to do, as I still have to use the Items collection on the client some way like this:

var actualItem = Items.findOne({ _id: openorderitem.item._id });

Is there someway around this?

I hope you guys understand what I want to achieve! :slight_smile:

Thanks a bunch in advance,
best Patrick

2

Any ideas on this? Am I missing something? Is it best-practice in mongo to just insert the whole item object into my openorderitem? Is there some better/other way to basically mimic SQL joins or Mongoose populates? … or is there really no other way than to publish all the collections I need and then “join” them together on the client?!