Setting Up A Category System In My Application

Question

So just today I've started using Meteor(myself being strictly a front-end designer) to try and turn one of my latest creations into a well-built dynamic web application.

The majority of the project is based around a forum structure so I am trying to build a hierarchy between Categories, Forums, and Threads. My current approach is to have separate collections, one for the forums/categories, and another for the threads, and then another for the posts.

My current dilemma is that I'm having an issue(fundamentally) as to how I will call all of the forums under a category. My current structure is setup where each forum has a "parent" set to the ID of the category they go under but I'm just not sure how I am going to go about getting them to display properly organized.

My current approach is to have a {{>Categories}} template, and then inside that template is:

<template name="categories">
    {{#each cname}}
    <div class="category">
        <div class="title">{{name}}</div>
        {{> forums}}
    </div>
    {{/each}}
</template>

And the logic I used to display all of the categories is(type: 0 defines it as a category):

Template.categories.helpers({
    cname: function() {
        return Forums.find({type: 0})
    }
});

Now the {{>forums}} helper I'm just completely stuck on. Here is what the template looks like:

<template name="forums">
    {{#each fname}}
    <div class="forum">
        <div class="ficon"><i class="{{ficon}}"></i></div>
        <div class="fname"><a href="forum.php">{{name}}</a><br><div class="fdesc">{{description}}</div></div>
        <div class="fstats">{{threads}}<br><span class="sub">Threads</span></div>
        <div class="fstats">{{posts}}<br><span class="sub">Posts</span></div>
    </div>
    {{/each}}
</template>

I can get it to show all of the forums, but I am still confused as to how I will make the specific forums show up only under the specific categories in the listing.

If anyone is willing to help that'd be awesome!

Answer 1

The easiest way would be to denormalize, and include the "category" field right in your post collection. If you don't want to do that, you need to use some kind of joins - a db query that incorporates data from two collections. There are reactive and non-reactive joins, as well as several other considerations that depend largely on how you want your app to work, but there is an abundance of information here:

https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/reactive-joins-in-meteor/

This question is probably a little on the broad side, but hopefully this will get you started :)

EDIT: On reading the question again, I saw that you wanted to create a hierarchy, and hence the extra collections. Mongo is really not great for relational data, and starting with three collections like this will definitely make things harder for you. FWIW, I highly recommend denormalizing to include the category and forum information in each post.