Check if the Meteor.users subscription is populated

Question

How can verify the Meteor.users collection is ready?

I have some code setup to run on Meteor (Release 0.7.0.1) startup on the client that is not behaving correctly because the Meteor.users collection isn't populated yet. In this code Meteor.users._connection.status().connected returns true and DDP._allSubscriptionsReady() returns false so the Meteor.users.findOne call returns nothing even though it should have returned the user.

Meteor.startup(function() {
    Deps.autorun(function () {
        var userTracker = PersistentSession.get('userTracker');
        var userTrackerMissing = !userTracker;
        var anonymousUserMissing = !Meteor.users.findOne({"_id": userTracker});

        if (Meteor.users._connection.status().connected) {
            if (DDP._allSubscriptionsReady()) {
                if (userTrackerMissing || anonymousUserMissing) {
                    Meteor.loginAnonymously();
                }
            }
        }
    });
});

Answer 1

You might try using fast-render package. It makes Meteor.users collection to be populated from the start. Run:

mrt add fast-render

Check out this detailed article on how it works.

Answer 2

I was able to resolve this using standard Meteor facilities like this. On the server I published users like so.

Meteor.startup(function () {
    Meteor.publish("userData", function(userTracker) {
        var user = Meteor.users.find({_id: userTracker}).fetch();
        return Meteor.users.find({_id: userTracker},
            {
                fields:
                {
                    'votes': 1
                }
            }
        );
    });
});

On the client I did the following to check if the published userData was available yet.

Meteor.startup(function() {
    Deps.autorun(function () {
        var userTracker = PersistentSession.get('userTracker');
        var userTrackerMissing = !userTracker;

        var userReady = Meteor.subscribe('userData', PersistentSession.get('userTracker')).ready();
        if (userReady) {
            var anonymousUserMissing = !Meteor.users.findOne({"_id": PersistentSession.get('userTracker')});
            if (userTrackerMissing || anonymousUserMissing) {
                Meteor.loginAnonymously();
            }
        }
    });
});