Question

Is there a way to exclude certain properties from client updates?

It should not be possible to see the property when inspecting a collection in the console

Answer 1

Absolutely.

1. Remove the autopublish package which is turned on by default: meteor remove autopublish

2. Create your collection: Rooms = new Meteor.Collection("rooms"); No conditional isServer or isClient needed, as this should be present to both

3. In your server side code, publish only a subset of your collection by zeroing out the fields you don’t want the client to have:

   if (Meteor.isServer) {
       //you could also Rooms.find({ subsetId: 'some_id' }) a subset of Rooms
       Meteor.publish("rooms", function () {
           return Rooms.find({}, {fields: {secretInfo: 0}});
       });
   }
   

   NOTE: setting {secretInfo: 0} above does not set all instances of secretInfo for every row in the Rooms collection to zero. It removes the field altogether from the clientside collection. Think of 0 as the off switch 🙂

4. Subscribe client side to the published collection:

   if (Meteor.isClient) {
       Deps.autorun(function() {
           Meteor.subscribe("rooms");
       });
   }
   

Hope this helps!