generating and serving static files with Meteor

Question

I\'m looking to create static text files based upon the content of a supplied object, which can then be downloaded by the user. Here\'s what I was planning on doing:

Answer 1

Another option is to use a server side route to generate the content and send it to the user's browser for download. For example, the following will look up a user by ID and return it as JSON. The end user is prompted to save the response to a file with the name specified in the Content-Disposition header. Other headers, such as Expires, could be added to the response as well. If the user does not exist, a 404 is returned.

Router.route("userJson", {
    where: "server",

    path: "/user-json/:userId",

    action: function() {
        var user = Meteor.users.findOne({ _id: this.params.userId });

        if (!user) {
            this.response.writeHead(404);
            this.response.end("User not found");
            return;
        }

        this.response.writeHead(200, {
            "Content-Type": "application/json",
            "Content-Disposition": "attachment; filename=user-" + user._id + ".json"
        });
        this.response.end(JSON.stringify(user));
    }
});

This method has one big downside, however. Server side routes do not provide an easy way to get the currently logged in user. See this issue on GitHub.