Meteor Publish/Subscribe passing object with string parameter issue - meteor

Question

I am trying to pass a object { key:value} and send it to meteor publish so i can query to database.
My Mongo db database has (relevant datas only) for products:
products : {
categs:['Ladies Top','Gents'],
name : Apple
}
In meteor Publish i have the following:
Meteor.publish('product', (query) =>{
return Clothings.find(query);
})
In client i use the following to subscribe:
let query = {categs:'/ladies top/i'}; // please notice the case is lower
let subscribe = Meteor.subscribe('product',query);
if (subscribe.ready()){
clothings = Products.find(query).fetch().reverse();
let count = Products.find(query).fetch().reverse().length; // just for test
}
The issue is, when i send the query from client to server, it is automatically encoded eg:
{categs:'/ladies%top/i'}
This query doesnot seem to work at all. There are like total of more than 20,000 products and fetching all is not an option. So i am trying to fetch based on the category (roughly around 100 products each).
I am new to ,meteor and mongo db and was trying to follow existing code, however this doesnot seem to be correct. Is there a better way to improve the code and achieve the same ?
Any suggestion or idea is highly appreciated.
I did go through meteor docs but they dont seem to have examples for my scenario so i hope someone out there can help me :) Cheers !

Answer 1

Firstly, you are trying to send a regex as a parameter. That's why it's being encoded. Meteor doesn't know how to pass functions or regexes as parameters afaict.
For this specific publication, I recommend sending over the string you want to search for and building the regex on the server:
client:
let categorySearch = 'ladies top';
let obj = { categorySearch }; // and any other things you want to query on.
Meteor.subscribe('productCategory',obj);
server:
Meteor.publish('productCategory',function(obj){
check(obj,Object);
let query = {};
if (obj.categorySearch) query.category = { $regex: `/${obj.categorySearch}/i` };
// add any other search parameters to the query object here
return Products.find(query);
});
Secondly, sending an entire query objet to a publication (or Method) is not at all secure since an attacker can then send any query. Perhaps it doesn't matter with your Products collection.