Creating meteor collections that are subsets of the larger dataset

This is a pattern where you want to have multiple subscriptions for a single collection. In a normal meteor application, only the signed in user information is available on the client. What if we want to create an admin page which lists a subset of users in the DB? We can create a local client collection, which is a subset of the data on the server.

We use the _publishCursor method to do this.

Server:

Meteor.publish('allusers', function(){
  var sub = this;

  var allusersCursor = Meteor.users.find({});
  Mongo.Collection._publishCursor(allusersCursor, sub, 'allusers');

  sub.ready();

});

Client:

// client side only users collection
UserList = new Mongo.Collection('allusers');

Router:

// user list
Router.route('users', {
  name: "userList",
  waitOn: function(){
    return Meteor.subscribe('allusers');
  }
});

Template.userList.helpers({
  allusers: function(){
    return UserList.find();
  }
});