Follow Method and database updates

[fliptrail]

No description provided.

[kb0304]

How about we name it / make a generic "canFollow" method? Which can be later extended to support other use cases (if any)?

[kb0304]

You can directly use Meteor.userId()

[rodrigok]

Meteor.userId() is the best approach here, but just for your knowledge you could have used Meteor.user()._id since Meteor.user() will return the entire user's object, so on that case you are requesting the entire object twice.

And, if you want just one field from a query, please always pass that information to the query to not transfer unnecessary data from db to rocket.chat:

Users.findOneByUsername(Meteor.user().username, {fields: {_id: 1}});

[kb0304]

Why not validate at server startup and create this object there for every user to maintain consistency across all?

[kb0304]

As the number of Following/Followers increase, it would increase in size of each user object considerably. As the User object is perhaps the most commonly fetched object for number of other purposes in all other areas of the application, we might want to structure our schema as described here. Thoughts? @bizzbyster @dtoth
Check this

[bizzbyster]

@kb0304 @fliptrail I am not an expert on the server side architecture but I tend to agree with Karan based on the link he sent. If you are still unsure we can try to get some inputs from others on the RC team. But in my opinion this seems like a good approach.

[rodrigok]

Please, never put all your code inside an if, use the if first to stop the process:

if (!settings.get('Newsfeed_enabled')) {
    return false;
}

It will make the code cleaner and more understandable.

[rodrigok]

Why not use a direct update?

Users.update(userObject._id, { $set: { `followers.${ _id }`: '' } });

[rodrigok]

Meteor.userId() is the best approach here, but just for your knowledge you could have used Meteor.user()._id since Meteor.user() will return the entire user's object, so on that case you are requesting the entire object twice.

And, if you want just one field from a query, please always pass that information to the query to not transfer unnecessary data from db to rocket.chat:

Users.findOneByUsername(Meteor.user().username, {fields: {_id: 1}});

[rodrigok]

Here you could prevent the code duplication by deciding like:

const followersObject = userObject.followers || {};