Meteor Iron-Router Without Layout Template or JSON View

Question

Using Meteor Iron-Router how can I either render data as JSON or simply display it "raw" (without a layout template)

Essentially I want to be able to do something like:

this.route('rawdata', {
  path: '/raw/:collection',
  layoutTemplate: 'nolayout',
  template: 'raw'
})

where /raw/posts would display the raw json of Posts (the collection).

Thanks!

Notes:

I'm aware of JSON endpoint in Meteor But meteor-router is discontinued and Iron-Router does not appear to have a JSON-end-point feature.

I also had a look at https://atmospherejs.com/package/collection-api but it does not suit my needs because I need the ability to select a subset of the fields of the collection/record.

Answer 1

Make a raw layout template

<template name="direct_layout">
    {{> yield}}
</template>

Then use that as your layoutTemplate to directly use your template.

this.route('rawdata', {
    path: '/raw/:collection',
    layoutTemplate: 'direct_layout',
    template: 'raw'
});

I'm not sure whether you're using this as a placeholder for your actual code. If you intend to render data using JSON or actual raw text. You might want to consider using server-side routes. You should do something like this instead:

Note that this is server side code, unlike the above which runs on the client side:

this.route('serverRoute', {
  where: 'server',
  path: '/your-route',
  action: function() {
    var data = {this_is:'a json object'}


    this.response.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'application/json'});
    this.response.end(JSON.stringify(data));
  }
});

Have a look at Server side rendering on Iron-Router: https://github.com/EventedMind/iron-router/blob/master/DOCS.md#server-side-routing

Answer 2

See: https://github.com/EventedMind/iron-router/issues/114

(Note the comment amending the content type.)