This feature was added to Meteor Feb 2016

[Malcolm Hall]

As of Feb 2016 it is now possible to look up an existing collection, finally!!!

meteor/meteor#5845 (initial attempt)
meteor/meteor#6160 (fix)

Works like this:

Meteor.connection._stores['tasks']._getCollection()

[David Burles]

Hey @malhal thanks for letting me know, strange that no one mentioned it to me earlier

[Malcolm Hall]

So now we know they added it as a private API so that you could make use of it in your public API...will you be using it? 😉

[David Burles]

Yep, I'll try to update it sometime this week, though it looks like it won't be backwards compatible.

[Malcolm Hall]

Maybe there is a way to implement it differently depending on Meteor's version number?

[David Burles]

api.versionsFrom should take care of that. I'll also publish this current version as 1.0 (I should have done that a while back) then I'll release the newer one as 2.0.

[Malcolm Hall]

Nice! By the way I should mention so far I've only used this on the client so not sure about the server.

Update: doesn't appear to work on the server:

TypeError: Cannot read property '_stores' of undefined

Hmm maybe there is more to this than we thought.

[David Burles]

Hmm, would you mind finding out if that's the case back over on the PR?

[Gabriel Rubens Abreu]

For the server you can get them like:

Package['mongo].MongoInternals.defaultRemoteCollectionDriver().open('colName')

[Matteo Demicheli]

as in with import / export:

import { MongoInternals } from 'meteor/mongo'

MongoInternals.defaultRemoteCollectionDriver().open('colName')

[Yuom Theara]

Good, Now I found it 💯

[David Burles]

@StorytellerCZ I vaguely remember looking into this, granted it was over 5 years ago. I recall though that it wasn't ideal as there was no way to get collections across different connections, unlike the way this package currently works. Though there still might be a potential enhancement here.

[Jan Dvorak]

That is my conclusion as well. I will look into this in the future.