Firestore: Query by item in array of document

Question

I have a document "user" which has a key called "photos". Here is an array of strings being saved, namely the IDs of the "photo" documents.

I want to query "user" by this "photos" field: I want all users who have this ID in the "photos" property.

Is this possible through the firestore?

Answer 1

  Say you’re building an app where you can watch curated playlists of videos and your Firebase data looks like this:

// Firebase doesn't support arrays, so EVERYTHING is stored

// using object structure

/* code

{

 "playlists": {

   "09ad08afd": {

     "videos": {

       "1asdf" : "23423lkj234",

       "werv2" : "20982lkjbba"

     }

   },

   "76asdfd0f": {

     "videos": {

       "345s1" : "adbasdlkj234",

       "basr2" : "909ads0kjbba"

     }

   }

 },

 "videos": {

   "23423lkj234": [some url],

   "20982lkjbba": [some url],

   ...hundreds more,

   "909ads0kjbba": [some url],

   "adbasdlkj234": [some url]

 }

} 

So you have two ‘tables’. One is an object that consists of playlists with unique keys, and each playlist has a property called “videos” which is an object that consists of key:value pairs of uniques:video-ids.

Now, say you wanted to load a playlist. Because Firebase doesn’t support querying by passing in an array, there’s no way to do something like this to get all the video data that you need:

databaseRef

 .child('videos')

 .children(["23423lkj234", "20982lkjbba"])

 .on('value', snapshot => snapshot.val())

Retrieving all the videos and then filtering client-side is out as well, because that request is potentially unbounded. What’s the most efficient way to retrieve a subsection of the object by key?

I don’t know if this is THE best way, but a cleaner way to do this, and one that doesn’t require an external library of any sort, is this:

const videosToFetch = ["23423lkj234", "20982lkjbba"]

// Map the Firebase promises into an array

const videoPromises = videosToFetch.map(id => {

 return databaseRef.child('videos').child(id).on('value', s => s)

})

// Wait for all the async requests mapped into

// the array to complete

Promise.all(videoPromises)

 .then(videos => {

   // do something with the data

 })

 .catch(err => {

   // handle error

 }) 

Hope this helps! 

 

If you want to clear the Google Professional Cloud Architect certification exam then you can join Google Cloud Training.