How to normalise user data from varying structures in Meteor? - meteor

Question

Users in my Meteor app can create accounts 'manually' or with the accounts-facebook package.
If they create an account manually then in the database their email is stored like this:
emails: [address: 'hi#gmail.com', verified: false]
But if they use the Facebook login then its stored like this:
services: {
facebook: {
email: "james#gmail.com"
}
}
I have an user account page where I need to display the users email and allow them to change it. How can I deal with the varying structure?
I made this React component to display the users email. When I just had the default Meteor user profiles it worked, but now Ive added Facebook login it errors as props.user.emails doenst exist.
<div className="form-primary__row">
<label>Email:</label>
{props.user.emails.map((item, i) => {
return (
<input defaultValue={item.address} key={i} name="email" />
);
})}
</div>
This is my method for a user to update their email. It also worked when I just had Meteors accounts but won't work with Facebook.
Meteor.methods({
'user.updateEmail'({ email }) {
Meteor.users.update(
{ _id: Meteor.userId() },
{
$set: {
'emails.0.address': email,
'emails.0.verified': false,
},
},
);
},
});

Answer 1

One approach is to use Accounts.onCreated()
The function should return the user document (either the one passed in
or a newly-created object) with whatever modifications are desired.
The returned document is inserted directly into the Meteor.users
collection.
Accounts.onCreateUser(function (options, user) {
// if the account is created using the manual approach,
// simply return the user object that will be inserted into
// the Users collection.
if (!user.services.facebook) {
return user;
}
// if user is created using fb's API,
// manually set the emails array, then return the user object
// which will be inserted into the Users collection.
user.username = user.services.facebook.name;
user.emails = [{address: user.services.facebook.email}];
return user;
});
The above ensures that the emails array always contains the email, whichever the login method the user chooses to use.