Is there a nice way to wrap each Meteor.user in an object with prototype functions and such?

Question

I'm trying to come up with a nice way to wrap each user I fetch from the Meteor Accounts Collection in a function, including a few prototype helper functions and counts from other collections, etc. The best way to describe this is in code.

The User function I want to wrap each user in would look something like this:

// - - - - - -
// USER OBJECT
// - - - - - -

var currentUser = null; // holds the currentUser object when aplicable

function User(fbId) {
    var self   = this,
        u      = (typeof id_or_obj == 'string' || id_or_obj instanceof String ? Meteor.users.findOne({'profile.facebook.id': id_or_obj}) : id_or_obj);

    self.fb_id = parseInt(u.profile.facebook.id, 10),

    // Basic info
    self.first_name = u.profile.facebook.first_name,
    self.last_name  = u.profile.facebook.last_name,
    self.name       = u.name,
    self.birthday   = u.birthday,
    self.email      = u.profile.facebook.email,

    // Quotes
    self.likeCount  = Likes.find({fb_id: self.fb_id}).count() || 0;
}

// - - - - - - -
// USER FUNCTIONS
// - - - - - - -

User.prototype = {

    // Get users avatar
    getAvatar: function() {
        return '//graph.facebook.com/' + this.fb_id + '/picture';
    },

    getName: function(first_only) {
        return (first_only ? this.first_name : this.name);
    }

};

I can easily have a global 'currentUser' variable, that holds this information about the currently logged in user on the client side like this:

Meteor.autorun(function() {
    if (Meteor.user()) {
        currentUser = new User(Meteor.user().profile.facebook.id);
    }
});

It's also easy to implement this into a Handlebars helper, replacing the use of {{currentUser}} like this:

Handlebars.registerHelper('thisUser', function() {
    if (Meteor.user()) {
        return new User(Meteor.user());
    } else {
        return false;
    }
});

What I want to do in addition to this is to make it so that when Meteor returns Meteor.user() or Meteor.users.find({}).fetch(), it includes these helper functions and short handles for first_name, last_name, etc.

Can I somehow extend Meteor.user() or is there some way to do this?

Answer 1

In Meteor 0.5.8, you can just tack on a transform function like so:

Meteor.users._transform = function(user) { 
  // attach methods, instantiate a user class, etc.
  // return the object
  // e.g.: 
  return new User(user);
} 

You can do the same with non-user collections, but you can also do it this way when you instantiate the Collection:

Activities = new Meteor.Collection("Activities", {
  transform: function (activity) { return new Activity(activity); }
});

(this way doesn't seem to work with the 'special' users collection)