Does Meteor remain reactive when using the REST API

Question

I plan to use Qualtrics REST API to get the data collected from the survey. Can I save Meteor reactivity directly through the rest of the api, or do I need to save data from the rest of the API in MongoDB in order to enable real-time update in the application?

Any advice and further reading would be wonderful.

This will probably sound like a noob question, but I'm just starting with Meteor and JS as server side code and have never used a web api before.

Answer 1

It all depends on what you do with the returned data. Assuming that you periodically conduct a survey or the API has some kind of push service (I have never heard of this before, so I have no idea), you will need to store the data that it returns in the reactive data source: perhaps the Collection variable or Session, depending on how persistence is required. Any Meteor templates that access these structures have reactivity, as described here .

Obviously, you will probably need to poll the API at the appropriate regular interval for this set to work. Take a look at Meteor.setInterval or meteor-cron , which is probably preferable.