Meteor.loggingIn() waits for all subscriptions to finish before changing its state

[ni-ko-o-kin]

Meteor: 1.8.2
OS: Ubuntu 19.04
Browser: Chrome 76, Firefox 71
reproduction repo: https://github.com/ni-ko-o-kin/meteor-loggingin-subscriptions

The expected behavior:
When a user logs in (with username: 'username' and password: 'password' in the reproduction-repo) Meteor.loggingIn() should return true and after it is finished the subscriptions should start to load.

In the reproduction-repo, after logging in, the page should first show 'logging in', then 'subs loading' and then the numbers of links.

The actual behavior:
After the user logs in, Meteor.loggingIn() return true until all subscriptions are loaded.

In the reproduction-repo, after logging in, the page shows 'logging in' until all subscriptions are loaded. 'subs loading' is never displayed.

This only happens when the user logs in, but not when the user is already logged in and refreshes the page!

You can login with Meteor.loginWithPassword('username', 'password').

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[ni-ko-o-kin]

Bug is still there with Meteor 1.8.2.

[filipenevola]

thanks @ni-ko-o-kin , I just labeled as confirmed so stale bot is going to ignore it.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[WilliamKelley]

I do not think this is a bug. This is canonical behavior that occurs because the publication depends on this.userId which is a reactive data source (setup internally with Tracker).

When you use Meteor.loginWith*** after the page loads, the client has already subscribed to the publication, which has been initialized for that connection and the dependency tracked. During a successful login, setUserId is called. This can cause the publication to immediately react (i.e. Fibers.yield), interrupting the login from returning, and start publishing those docs. Once the publication is done and returns, the server-side login finishes, returns to the client, and the client finishes, setting loggingIn to false.

This is in contrast to when you reload the page; the accounts-base package runs _initLocalStorage on load (before your component renders) and calls loginWithToken. In this case, the subscription has not been initialized, and the dependency is not tracked. Hence, there's no publication associated with the connection to interrupt the login process when the user id is set. Instead the login success returns to the client immediately. Only once this is done does your component get a chance to render and start the subscription.

The code was written in awareness of these facts:

• accounts-client noted that all subscriptions will be rerun and ready by the time loggingIn will be set to false, here
• ddp-common noted subscriptions will be rerun in the definition of setUserId on the DDP MethodInvocation class, here

---

As for a workaround, if you want to avoid this behavior for a given publication, you should condition your subscribe calls to only occur when the user is logged-in.

let handle
if (Meteor.userId()) {
  handle = Meteor.subscribe('links.list');
} else {
  handle = undefined;
}