Need to remove ObjectID() from _id using Meteor

Question

I am retrieving records from Mongo using Meteor. I use the {{_id}} placeholder in my meteor template to use the _id field of the record, but it adds this into my template....

ObjectID("54f27a1adfe0c11c824e04e9")

... and I would like just to have...

54f27a1adfe0c11c824e04e9

How do I do this?

Answer 1

Just add a global helper:

Template.registerHelper('formatId', function(data) {
  return (data && data._str) || data;
});

You can also do it like this with ES6 syntax :

Template.registerHelper('formatId', (id) => (id && id._str) || id);

And use it in any template like this:

{{formatId _id}}

This will work for both mongo-style ObjectIds and meteor-style random strings.

Answer 2

Since your documents are using the MongoDB ID format rather than the default Meteor ID format (simply a randomly generated string), you will need to use the MongoDB ObjectId.toString() function described here. But unfortunately, this simply results in your ObjectID being printed out as a string like ObjectID("54f27a1adfe0c11c824e04e9").

I would recommend creating a document ID template helper that cleans your document IDs before including them in the template. Since this issue is most likely related to all of your documents in all of your collections, I would further suggest creating a global template helper. This can be done like so:

Template.registerHelper('cleanDocumentID', function(objectID) {
    var objectIdString = objectID.toString();
    var cleanedString = objectIDString.slice(objectIDString.indexOf('"') + 1, -2);

    return cleanedString;
});

This template helper slices out just the actual object ID string from the string provided by the ObjectId.toString() function. You can use this template helper in your templates like so:

{{cleanDocumentID _id}}

I know that this is a lot messier than simply using the document ID in the template like {{_id}}, but it is necessary due to the fact that your documents have the MongoDB ObjectID-type document ID rather than the simple randomly generated string as used by Meteor by default.

If you would like to learn more about how to set your MongoDB collections to use randomly generated strings for document IDs and avoid this mess, check out this.