How to create simple userProfile route in Meteor with Iron Router - meteor

Question

I am trying to route to the current user's profile page using Iron Router, but the 'pathFor' Spacebars helper is not passing the href attribute for the a tag.
This is my template:
<div class="collapse navbar-collapse" id="navigation">
<ul class="nav navbar-nav">
{{#if currentUser}}
<li>Submit Request</li>
<li>View Profile</li>
{{/if}}
</ul>
<ul class="nav navbar-nav navbar-right">
{{> loginButtons}}
</ul>
</div>
The href for the Submit Request button is passing in just fine, but for some reason the View Profile href is not getting passed in.
My router.js is as follows:
Router.route('/users/:_id', {
name: 'userProfile',
data: function() {
return Meteor.users.findOne(this.params._id);
}
});
In my app, I am routing to single "request" page (I created a collection called requests) by doing
Router.route('/requests/:_id, {
name: 'requestPage',
data: function() {
return Requests.findOne(this.params._id);
}
});
This routes correctly to a single request from the Requests collection, so I am confused why the userProfile route doesn't do the same.
Also, I tried to force this functionality by creating a click event on the template:
Template.header.events({
'click .userProfile': function(e) {
e.preventDefault();
var user = Meteor.user();
Router.go('userProfile', {_id: user._id});
}
});
..and this passed the correct href in to the template.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

The userProfile route needs an id parameter. When you call pathFor in a template with only the route name it will attempt to extract the parameters from the current context. Because the context isn't a user (it's a request?) you will end up with an invalid path.
You can set the context inline:
<li>View Profile</li>
Alternatively, you can set the context outside of the call using with:
{{#with currentUser}}
<li>View Profile</li>
{{/with}}