Subscriptions list / show best practices

help
1

I have an app that displays, say, a list of contacts. You can click through to view the detail of each contact.

On the detail page is it preferred to subscribe to all the contact data so that if/when the user returns to the list page there is no need to resubscribe to it? In the case that they clicked to view a contact’s detail from somewhere that’s not the list page then data for all the (published) contacts would have to be transferred just to show one contact, correct?

This is really a page-level subscription thing I suppose, using iron-router. I’m working on moving some of my subscriptions to the template level with the new 1.0.4 stuff.

I’m thinking that decisions like this are part of the design decisions that you need to make for your app. Just interested in others’ feedback!

2

Agree, I don’t think there’s a universal solution to the when-to-subscribe-and-for-how-long problem yet. Is anyone working on one? I’m thinking that it should be possible to record how users start and stop subscriptions and thereafter analyze it to figure out how subscriptions best should be cached for optimal performance (for the server and the user experience).

Meanwhile, there’s a package called meteorhacks:subs-manager which you may find useful.

3

Oh, wow. subs-manager looks like exactly what I need. I have a tabbed interface and on each click I’m reloading the data, even if it’s the second time that tab’s been clicked on. This causes a brief spinner on each click which should be avoidable. It looks like this package solves that problem. Thanks!