Publishing and subscribing to merged collections with react

I keep running into a big conceptual problem with Meteor and Mongo when i need to do complex things with multiple collections. The classic example being I need to publish a list of authors, that have multiple books associated with them, based on the bookId in the author collection. Seems pretty simple.

I have looked at “publish-composite”, but the issue here is that all of the examples use the Blaze template language to show you how to do this. I use react (like everybody else), so the use of template helpers is unhelpful in these examples.

Is there an actual way to create a publication that automatically combines collections on the server side and just delivers the results to the client? Publish-Composite honestly makes no sense to me and i don’t understand the point… if you’re going to have to manually query the collections anyway in your template and write helps for that, what does publish composite actually do for you?

That is exactly what reywood:publish-composite does. It has no dependency on Blaze or another UI layer. The examples in the documentation are just there to prove it works. They could just as easily be using React, Angular or Vue.