Meteor: oncreated vs onrendered

Question

The dilemma:

• oncreated: the template is not yet rendered (fires only one time for each template).
• onrendered: the template is rendered (fires multiple times).

Is it possible to fire a function only once the template is rendered fully?

I have a list of messages, that look similar to this

<template name="messages">
    <div id="messages">
        <span class="message">{{this.message}}</span>
    </div>
</template>

Each time a new message is inserted into the DOM, I want to know if the text of the message contains the username.

The following code snippet runs multiple times, of which it should only run a single time.

Template.messages.rendered = function() {

    var username = Meteor.user().services.twitter.screenName;
    $("#messages").bind("DOMSubtreeModified", function() {    
        var lastmessage = $('.message').last().text();
        if (lastmessage.indexOf(username) > -1) {
            //Do something
        }
    }
}

Interchanging rendered by created & changing the template to contain a single message, makes the function run one time for each new message. This means it takes the second to last value for the lastmessage variable:

Template.message.created = function() {
    var username = Meteor.user().services.twitter.screenName;

    var lastmessage = $('.message').last().text();//this is not the last message
    if (lastmessage.indexOf(username) > -1) {
        //Do something
    }
}

Answer 1

Honestly couldn't you do something like this in "rendered". Or you could put in some callback after you render your extra stuff into the DOM.

Additionally you could use self.autorun(() => { if(self.alreadyRun) return; ... }) and self.alreadyRun = new ReactiveVar(false).

Just guessing!

var self = this;

self.alreadyRun = false;
if(self.alreadyRun){
    self.alreadyRun = true;

    // run once code here

}