Meteor Text Search has no results? - mongodb

Question

My webapp consists of just a list of topics and a search field to filter them with.
I started by inserting an object into my MongoDB:
$meteor mongo
meteor:PRIMARY> db.topics.insert({title:"Hello World!"});
I wrote this in my .coffee file to verify that it showed up as expected:
topics = new Mongo.Collection "topics"
if Meteor.isClient
Template.body.helpers {
topics: -> topics.find {}
}
That worked fine. So I decided to move to having a fixed filter of "Hello". I replaced topics.find {} with:
topics.find {$text: {$search: "Hello"}}
This caused my list to appear empty. I also tried this:
topics.find {title: {$text: {$search: "Hello"}}}
But that also did not work. What am I missing here?
(Also, this is my first time using CoffeeScript. The generated JavaScript file looked right to me, but if you see any unnecessary punctuation or other bad habits in here, please point it out to me. As someone who tends to help Python programmers, I know how obnoxious it is for people new to the language to be littering it with unnecessary semicolons.)
Update
I have added in the following server code as directed by Blakes Seven in his answer:
if Meteor.isServer
Meteor.startup -> topics._ensureIndex {title: "text"}
If I query the MongoDB from the command line as below, it works fine:
$meteor mongo
meteor:PRIMARY> db.topics.find({$text: {$search: "Hello"}})
{ "_id" : ObjectId("559495cf7b8f68a693d8a3a8"), "title" : "Hello World!" }
However, within my application, in the client code, topics.find {$text: {$search: "Hello"}} is still not working.
Update 2
Blakes Seven wanted to see this:
$meteor mongo
meteor:PRIMARY> db.topics.getIndexes()
[
{
"v" : 1,
"key" : {
"_id" : 1
},
"name" : "_id_",
"ns" : "meteor.topics"
},
{
"v" : 1,
"key" : {
"_fts" : "text",
"_ftsx" : 1
},
"name" : "title_text",
"ns" : "meteor.topics",
"safe" : true,
"weights" : {
"title" : 1
},
"default_language" : "english",
"language_override" : "language",
"textIndexVersion" : 2
}
]

Answer 1

You need to create a "text index" on your collection before you can perform $text search queries.
You can create this index to deploy in Meteor.startup under server/indexes as:
Meteor.startup(function() {
topics._ensureIndex({ "title": "text" })
]);
MongoDB 3.x series recommends it's method .createIndex(), but the current meteor methods are like still calling .ensureIndex() at present.
This isn't really that much of a concern as the preferred method has expanded sytax to support additional features mostly, and none of these should be a general concern.
If you find a need for those features, you can always script "index" deployment outside of your Meteor application code.
Just as a sidenote, it's a general convention to refer to a collection model both in the "singular" rather than "plural" form, as the collection itself is the "plural" and not the model. Also a general convention is a "capital" first.