Using node ddp-client to insert into a meteor collection from Node

Question

I\'m trying to stream some syslog data into Meteor collections via node.js. It\'s working fine, but the Meteor client polling cycle of ~10sec is too long of a cycle for my t

Answer 1

According to this screencast its possible to simply call the meteor-methods declared by the collection. In your case the code would look like this:

ddpclient.call('/counts/insert', [{hits: 1111}], function(err, result) {
    console.log('called function, result: ' + result);
})

Answer 2

Ok, I got it working after looking closely at some code and realizing I was totally over-thinking things. The protocol is actually pretty straight forward, RPC ish stuff.

I'm happy to report that it absolutely worked around the server-side insert delay (manual Mongo inserts were taking several seconds to poll/update the clients).

If you go through DDP, you get all the real-time(ish) goodness that you've come to know and love with Meteor :)

For posterity and to hopefully help drive some other folks to interesting use cases, here's the setup.

Use Case

I am spooling some custom syslog data into a node.js daemon. This daemon then parses and inserts the data into Mongo. The idea was to come up with a real-timey browser based reporting project for my first Meteor experiment.

All of it worked well, but because I was inserting into Mongo outside of Meteor proper, the clients had to poll every ~10 seconds. In another SO post @TimDog suggested I look at DDP for this, and his suggestion looks to have worked perfectly.

I've tested it on my system, and I can now instantly update all Meteor clients via a node.js async application.

Setup The basic idea here is to use the DDP "call" method. It takes a list of parameters. On the Meteor server side, you export a Meteor method to consume these and do your MongoDB inserts. It's actually really simple:

Step 1: npm install ddp

Step 2: Go to your Meteor server code and do something like this, inside of Meteor.methods:

Meteor.methods({

'push': function(k,v) { // k,v will be passed in from the DDP client.
    console.log("got a push request")
    var d = {};
    d[k] = parseInt(v);
    Counts.insert(d, function(err,result){ // Now, simply use your Collection object to insert.
        if(!err){ 
            return result
            }else{
            return(err)
            }
        });
     }
  });

Now all we need to do is call this remote method from our node.js server, using the client library. Here's an example call, which is essentially a direct copy from the example.js calls, tweaked a bit to hook our new 'push' method that we've just exported:

ddpclient.call('push', ['hits', '1111'], function(err, result) {
console.log('called function, result: ' + result);
})

Running this code inserts via the Meteor server, which in turn instantly updates the clients that are connected to us :)

I'm sure my code above isn't perfect, so please chime in with suggestions. I'm pretty new to this whole ecosystem, so there's a lot of opportunity to learn here. But I do hope that this helps save some folks a bit of time. Now, back to focusing on making my templates shine with all this real-time data :)