What I need:
I want to save articles or notes in Firestore with their respective fields:
- Title
- Content (texts or paragraphs)
- Creation date
- Owners (to share that article with other
people and who can edit them like: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/solutions/role-based-access)
But when I show the list of articles I don't need the content field (to save bandwidth). I've read that (maybe I'm wrong), it is not possible to make a query to get only specific fields from a document with Firestore.
If it were normal SQL to obtain specific columns from articles (without its content) It would be something like:
SELECT title, creation_date, ...
FROM table_name;
So I've opted to separate the content for two root-level collections (for flexibility and scalability)
My current structure:
Articles collection:
- `articles` [collection]
- `ARTICLE_ID` [document]
- `creatorId` [field]
- `title` [field]
- `date` [field]
- `owners` [obj field]
- {user1_id}: true
- {user2_id}: true
...
Contents collection:
- `contents` [collection]
- `{ARTICLE_ID}` [document]
- `content` [field]
To get articles list in realtime:
firebase.firestore().collection('articles')
.where(`owners.${user.uid}`, '==', true)
.onSnapshot(querySnapshot => {
const articles = []
querySnapshot.forEach((doc) => {
articles.push({
id: doc.id,
...doc.data()
})
})
// do something with articles array
})
To show in another view and get the entire article with its content:
const db = firebase.firestore()
const articleRef = db.collection('articles').doc(articleId)
const contentRef = db.collection('contents').doc(articleId) // same Id as article
articleRef.get().then(articleDoc => {
if (articleDoc.exists) {
contentRef.get().then(contentDoc => {
if (contentDoc.exists) {
const article = {
...articleDoc.data(),
...contentDoc.data()
}
// full article obj
}
})
}
})
My questions
Do you think it's better to do two queries (getArticle and getContent) at the same time and wait with Promise.all() instead of nesting the querys like I do?
Is there a better way to get the article and its content with one query or more efficiently? Some tips or ideas?
Thank you very much in advance!
