#Adding Sortable to Meteor File Collection Work-in-Progress to re-order rows in Meteor File Collection (MFC) Sample App using drag-and-drop sorting provided by Rubaxa Sortable for Meteor.

Update (12 July 2015)

Please see the situation assessment by the Meteor File Collection Author.

Description of progress so far (11 July 2015)

I forked Meteor File Collection Sample App and added Sortable hooks by following instructions at Rubaxa Sortable for Meteor including suggested approach of using {{#sortable items=<cursor> options=myOptions}}. Rubaxa has created #sortable to replace #each and I moved the row HTML (from the MFC Sample App) into a new template called sortableRow as follows:

<tbody class="sortable">
  {{#sortable items=dataEntries options=sortableOptions}}
    {{> sortableRow }}
  {{/sortable}}
</tbody>

I also had to move some helpers to support the new sortableRow template. The Rubaxa Sortable Example Demo and Source provided some help with the integration, but the Rubaxa Sortable example used the same word "attributes" for collection names and helpers, which confused me at first. For clarity I've named collection names and helpers separately in this repo, but since Meteor File Collection has a multi-faceted approach to collections, I'm not sure I'm passing collections and cursors correctly between the two packages.
Finally, I also added two columns to the MFC Sample App.

1. One column displays the order index of each row (which should always be ascending), and
2. The final column provides a click/touch target for dragging each row up or down.

What works

I am able to drag one row to a new position. Unfortunately, I then encountered the following problems.

Problems

1. Error in Client Console

Error: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'findOne' of undefined

Source: Reactivize.js:95

templateInstance.adjustOrders = function adjustOrders(itemId, orderPrevItem, orderNextItem) {
  var orderField = templateInstance.options.sortField;
  var selector = {}, modifier = {$set: {}};
  var ids = [];
  var startOrder = templateInstance.collection.findOne(itemId)[orderField];  // Line 95

Although templateInstance.options exists and yields the correct sortField, templateInstance.collection is undefined.

2. Where to put and how to update the order index

Also, the order index is not populated with values in my integration however the Rubaxa demo orders the values when items are added to the collection. That seems a clue that I've not enabled inserts or updates properly, but I'm a bit lost in the Rubaxa code. I've tried putting the order index at different nesting depths of the collection (as commented in my code), but neither level seemed to help. Possibly it's a pub/sub problem. As a last attempt, I set the order indices manually using the Mongo console and they moved appropriately in the table, but re-ordering by dragging still gave the error above.

##Please Help! Before I cry "Uncle" and set up a relic up/down button!