Bringing an External REST Feed into a Meteor Project
This week with Meteor we attempted to bring in an external REST feed into the project. We were looking to bring the CodeMash session feed into the application. In order to do this, we needed to use import a Meteor package. We decided to use the http (https://atmospherejs.com/meteor/http ) package to do this since it was referenced in the Meteor documentation and looked to be the standard way to accomplish the task.
We added the package in with the following command:
meteor add http
The documentation was a little lacking on how to fully implement a GET call to a REST service from the server and return it to the client. We ended accomplishing it by creating a server method to GET the sessions, notice that we are filtering the sessions by SessionType. Documentation for the http call itself can be found here:http://docs.meteor.com/#/full/http
Meteor.methods({getSchedule:function(){
this.unblock();
try{
var result=HTTP.get("https://cmprod-speakers.azurewebsites.net/api/sessionsdata");
return result.data.filter(function(item){
return item.SessionType==="Pre-Compiler"||
item.SessionType==="Regular Session";
});
}catch (e) {|
//Got a network error, time-out or HTTP error in the 400 or 500 range.
return";
}
}});
Meteor.call("getSchedule", function(err, data) {
Session.set('sessionList', date);
});
Template.scheduleAdmin.helpers ({
"sessionList": function(){
return Session.get('sessionList');
}
});
This was the part we had a bit of trouble on. We tried just calling the server synchronously, but it kept returning “undefined” for the data. We discovered that we needed to use a callback when we called the server function and once we got the response from the server we put the data in session. According to the Meteor docs:
Session provides a global object on the client that you can use to store an arbitrary set of key-value pairs. Use it to store things like the currently selected item in a list.
What’s special about Session is that it’s reactive. If you call Session.get(“currentList”) from inside a template, the template will automatically be re-rendered whenever Session.set(“currentList”, x) is called.
So, by storing the data in session, and setting the template helper sessionList to the session value, the data will show up on the page as soon as the server callback is fired.
<template name="scheduleAdmin">
<h2>Schedule Admin</h2>
<ul>
{{#each sessionList}}
<li>{{Title}}</li>
{{/each}}
</ul>
</template>
From here, were looking into some ways to either cache this data or speed things up since there is a definite lag when pulling this data.
