Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Meteor”

Posts

Meteor: Creating Custom Reactive Data Sources

A core concept in Meteor is reactivity. Basically, this means that Meteor can re-run computational functions automatically whenever their (reactive) data sources change. Typically, this happens without your having to think about it, since you’re using an in-built reactive data source, such as database collections. A typical example of a function needing to react to a data source (e.g. a collection) changing is a template helper, which needs to produce a new value to base the template rendering on.

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Posts

Calling Trello API from Meteor

I just ported the Trello client API to a Meteor package, in order to be able to authorize my application before making actual API calls from the server side (let’s just avoid the hassle of cross-site scripting).

The following snippet shows my client side flow for creating a Trello board; first I authorize against Trello, then I call a Meteor server method to perform the corresponding Trello REST API call:

Session.set("isWaiting", true)
# MuzHack's Trello app key
Trello.setKey(Meteor.settings.public.trelloKey)
# Have the Trello client lib display a popup wherein the user authorizes MuzHack's read-write access
Trello.authorize({
  type: "popup"
  name: "MuzHack"
  scope: { read: true, "write": true }
  success: ->
    logger.info("Trello authorization succeeded")
    token = Trello.token()
    Meteor.call('createTrelloBoard', inputValues.name, inputValues.desc, inputValues.org,
      token, (error, result) ->
        Session.set("isWaiting", false)
        if error?
          logger.warn("Server failed to create Trello board:", error)
          notificationService.warn("Error",
            "Server failed to create Trello board: #{error.reason}.")
        else
          logger.debug("Server was able to successfully create Trello board")
    )
  error: ->
    logger.warn("Trello authorization failed")
      Session.set("isWaiting", false)
})
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Posts

Uploading Resized Pictures to S3 in Meteor Application

I am facing the need to upload pictures to Amazon S3 in my Meteor application, MuzHack. The pictures must be resized before storing in S3, and there’s the option of doing this either on my server or in the client. I have elected to go with the latter for now, since it’s simple and doesn’t put load on my server.

To resize pictures client side I am using the Meteor Clientside Image Manipulation library, and to upload pictures to S3 I am using Slingshot.

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Posts

How to Connect to Meteor's MongoDB Instance from Python

Today I wrote a Python script in order to insert data into Meteor’s MongoDB instance, and the first question that came up was how to get hold of the connection parameters. It turns out that Meteor has a command for this purpose:

meteor mongo -U [site]

If you leave out the 'site' argument, you’ll get the URL to connect to the local MongoDB instance for the current Meteor app (relative to the directory you’re in). The output will look something like mongodb://127.0.0.1:3001/meteor. The final component of the URL is the name of the database ('meteor').

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Posts

How to Set Page Title Dynamically with Meteor, Iron Router and SEO

In my Meteor-based project MusitechHub, I recently had to figure out how to set page title dynamically for certain pages. I’m using Iron Router to implement routing in the application, which laid the premise for the solution.

I gathered from the #meteor channel on IRC that I could base my solution on Manuel Schoebel’s SEO package, which is able to set the current page title. Since I wasn’t able to figure out myself how to apply it, I continued by asking on Stack Overflow. Thanks to a helpful answer here, I figured out that I could use Iron Router’s onAfterAction hook to call SEO.set in order to set the title for a certain route/page:

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