Using {{#each}} to fill a calendar with reservations: best practices - mongodb

Question

I'm building an html table with dates as columns and hotel rooms as rows.
I'm fairly new to Meteor and have had headaches over this.
Because a html table is build by rows, I need to iterate over the rooms. So, if I am not mistaking this limits me to choosing the following file structure in MongoDB:
Room Collection:[
{Room1:[{"31/03/2015", "2/04/2015",....]},
{Room2:["22/03/2015",...]},
...]
Before this I had a reservation object where every reservation had the name of the room in it. Because there is no way I can group these dates over different collections, I changed it to the above structure.
So, okay, now I am able to move the cursor from room to room and build table rows.
Bigger problem now is that I then would iterate over 7 days (lets just say, for now I only retrieve queries for the current week). If I now get three days back from the database that are booked. I am only able to loop three times. Which is bad news because I need to fill 7 td elements. So somehow I should Identify which days of the week are taken by the reservation.
Is it a possibility to just store every date of the year in MongoDB and indicate wether there is a booking for that date? That seems far from elegant.
Or should I compare the dates of the week with the dates retrieved from the server, so on the client side?
I think I am looking at this problem the wrong way. I would love to here somebody else's opinion on this. :)
Kind regards

Answer 1

I always start off with an ER model of what I have & what I want.
How I think you currently have it: 1 Room has many Reservations. 1 Reservation has 1 datetime.
How you want to access it: 1 Day has many Reservations. 1 Reservation has 1 datetime & 1 room.
The Mongo way to do it: 1 Reservation has 1 room & 1 date.
So your original idea was correct (I'm not sure what you mean by not being able to group in other collections, we can tackle that in comments if you like):
Reservations = {
name: 'The Johnson Family Reunion',
room: 'Grand Ballroom',
datetime: new Date
}
For simplicity, we'll assume you aren't changing months in this example & I assume you've already got the code down to assign days to those squares.
Each square in the calendar should follow a dayofMonth template.
That will afford you a this that has the date in your helper, so you can write something like this:
Template.dayOfMonth.helpers({
reservations: function() {
return Reservations.find({datetime.getDate():
this.datetime.getDate()}).sort(datetime);
}
}
Then, your template is something simple like:
{{#each reservations}}
{{reservations.name}}
{{/each}}
Hope it helps!