Say I have this kind of structure
A (collection): {
a (doc): {
name:'Tim',
B (collection):{
b (doc): {
color:'blue'
}
}
}
}
where A and B are collections while a and b are documents.
Is there a way to get everything contained in a root document with one query?
If I query like this
db.collection("A").doc("a").get()
I just gets name:'Tim' field. What I want is to also get all B's documents.
I basically wish my query returns
{
user:'Tim',
B (collection):{
b (doc): {
color:'blue'
}
}
}
Is it possibly or do I really need to make multiple queries one for each collection :/ ?
Say I have a really deep nested tree of collections representing the user profile, my costs will raise like hell since each time I load a user profile I have a multiplier of read requests 1 x N where N is the depth of my tree :/.
If you are concerned about costs of each pull, you will need to structure your data according to your common view / pull needs, rather than what you might prefer for a perfect structure. If you need to pull these things together every time, Consider using "maps" for things that do not actually need to be sub-collections with documents.
In this example, "preferences" is a map.
{
user: "Tim",
preferences: {
color: "blue",
nickname: "Timster"
}
}
Each document is also limited in size to 1MB - so if you need to store something for this user that will scale and continue to grow, like log records, then it would make sense to break logs into a sub-collection that only gets pulled when you want it, making each log entry a separate document... And whether all logs for all users are stored in a separate parent collection, or a sub-collection of each user really depends on how you will be pulling logs and what will result in fast speeds, balanced against costs of pulls. If you're showing this user their last 10 searches, then a search-log would make good sense as a sub-collection. If you're pulling all search data for all users for analysis, then a separate parent level collection would make sense because you can pull all logs in 1 pull, to prevent the need to pull logs from each user separately.
You can also nest your pulls and promises together for convenience purposes.
// Get reference to all of the documents
console.log("Retrieving list of documents in collection");
let documents = collectionRef.limit(1).get()
.then(snapshot => {
snapshot.forEach(doc => {
console.log("Parent Document ID: ", doc.id);
let subCollectionDocs = collectionRef.doc(doc.id).collection("subCollection").get()
.then(snapshot => {
snapshot.forEach(doc => {
console.log("Sub Document ID: ", doc.id);
})
}).catch(err => {
console.log("Error getting sub-collection documents", err);
})
});
}).catch(err => {
console.log("Error getting documents", err);
});
As we know querying in Cloud Firestore is shallow by default. This type of query isn't supported, although it is something Google may consider in the future.
Adding to Matt R answer, if you're using babel or you can use async/await, you can get the same result with less code(no catch/then):
// Get reference to all of the documents
console.log("Retrieving list of documents in collection");
let documents = await collectionRef.get();
documents.forEach(async doc => {
console.log("Parent Document ID: ", doc.id);
let subCollectionDocs = await collectionRef.doc(doc.id).collection("subCollection").get()
subCollectionDocs.forEach(subCollectionDoc => {
subCollectionDoc.forEach(doc => {
console.log("Sub Document ID: ", doc.id);
})
});
});
Related
In my main page I have a list of users and i'd like to choose and open a channel to chat with one of them.
I am thinking if use the id is the best way and control an access of a channel like USERID1-USERID2.
But of course, user 2 can open the same channel too, so I'd like to find something more easy to control.
Please, if you want to help me, give me an example in javascript using a firebase url/array.
Thank you!
A common way to handle such 1:1 chat rooms is to generate the room URL based on the user ids. As you already mention, a problem with this is that either user can initiate the chat and in both cases they should end up in the same room.
You can solve this by ordering the user ids lexicographically in the compound key. For example with user names, instead of ids:
var user1 = "Frank"; // UID of user 1
var user2 = "Eusthace"; // UID of user 2
var roomName = 'chat_'+(user1<user2 ? user1+'_'+user2 : user2+'_'+user1);
console.log(user1+', '+user2+' => '+ roomName);
user1 = "Eusthace";
user2 = "Frank";
var roomName = 'chat_'+(user1<user2 ? user1+'_'+user2 : user2+'_'+user1);
console.log(user1+', '+user2+' => '+ roomName);
<script src="https://getfirebug.com/firebug-lite-debug.js"></script>
A common follow-up questions seems to be how to show a list of chat rooms for the current user. The above code does not address that. As is common in NoSQL databases, you need to augment your data model to allow this use-case. If you want to show a list of chat rooms for the current user, you should model your data to allow that. The easiest way to do this is to add a list of chat rooms for each user to the data model:
"userChatrooms" : {
"Frank" : {
"Eusthace_Frank": true
},
"Eusthace" : {
"Eusthace_Frank": true
}
}
If you're worried about the length of the keys, you can consider using a hash codes of the combined UIDs instead of the full UIDs.
This last JSON structure above then also helps to secure access to the room, as you can write your security rules to only allow users access for whom the room is listed under their userChatrooms node:
{
"rules": {
"chatrooms": {
"$chatroomid": {
".read": "
root.child('userChatrooms').child(auth.uid).child(chatroomid).exists()
"
}
}
}
}
In a typical database schema each Channel / ChatGroup has its own node with unique $key (created by Firebase). It shouldn't matter which user opened the channel first but once the node (& corresponding $key) is created, you can just use that as channel id.
Hashing / MD5 strategy of course is other way to do it but then you also have to store that "route" info as well as $key on the same node - which is duplication IMO (unless Im missing something).
We decided on hashing users uid's, which means you can look up any existing conversation,if you know the other persons uid.
Each conversation also stores a list of the uids for their security rules, so even if you can guess the hash, you are protected.
Hashing with js-sha256 module worked for me with directions of Frank van Puffelen and Eduard.
import SHA256 from 'crypto-js/sha256'
let agentId = 312
let userId = 567
let chatHash = SHA256('agent:' + agentId + '_user:' + userId)
In real time you can't do a single query across multiple rootnodes, so I was wondering if doing multiple queries (nested one after the other) is a bad practice? I understand this can be done in one query in firestore, but I am specifically using realtime for this portion of my app due to high number of user read/writes.
reference.addListenerForSingleValueEvent(new ValueEventListener() {
#Override
public void onDataChange(#NonNull DataSnapshot dataSnapshot) {
//get Data from query one here
reference2.addListenerForSingleValueEvent(){
//get Data from query two here
reference3.addListenerForSingleValueEvent(){
//get Data from query three here
}
}
}
The alternative to doing multiple calls to read the corresponding entries from each reference, is to duplicate the data of the other entries under each reference.
It's a bit hard to reason in your abstract example, so let's pick a more concrete, simple use-case: a chat app. Say you have two-level entities: users, and chat messages. Each chat message is written by a user, and a user has a display name. In the most normalized data model this could be:
users: {
user1: {
name: "david s."
},
user2: {
name: "Doug Stevenson"
},
usere: {
name: "Frank van Puffelen"
}
},
messages: {
message1: {
message: "In real time you can't do a single query across multiple...",
uid: "user1"
},
message2: {
message: "In a very general sense, nested callbacks...",
uid: "user2"
}
message1: {
message: "The alternative to doing multiple calls...",
uid: "user3"
}
}
Now let's say that we have a use-case where we want to display the latest 10 chat messages, each with the name of the user who posted that message.
The above data works fine, but you will need to read the user names from the /users node, pretty much how you're doing now. This is known as a client-side join, and is quite efficient since Firebase pipelines the requests over a single connection.
You'd could deduplicate the lookup of the names using a cache, since the user names typically change much less frequently than the chat messages. This reduced the overhead since you're only loading each user's data once, but the code can get a bit verbose.
An alternative is to duplicate the minimal data that you need for your use-case. This means your data model would look like this:
users: {
user1: {
name: "david s."
},
user2: {
name: "Doug Stevenson"
},
usere: {
name: "Frank van Puffelen"
}
},
messages: {
message1: {
message: "In real time you can't do a single query across multiple...",
name: "david s.",
uid: "user1"
},
message2: {
message: "In a very general sense, nested callbacks...",
name: "Doug Stevenson",
uid: "user2"
}
message1: {
message: "The alternative to doing multiple calls...",
name: "Frank van Puffelen",
uid: "user3"
}
}
Now you can display the list of the latest 10 messages with a single read. The cost is that you use more storage, but typically storage should be considered cheap. The disadvantage in code is that you now need to write the duplicate data, which is more complex. And of course the duplicated data could get out of sync.
All above approaches are valid. Which one you pick depends on the use-cases of your app, your comfort level in duplicating data, and how much you personally value things like the amount of code, bandwidth consumption, etc. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, so you will have to make your own call.
For some great reading/viewing on the topic, see:
NoSQL data modeling
Firebase for SQL developers
How to write denormalized data in Firebase
Firebase data structure and url
some more of my answers on NoSQL questions
In a very general sense, nested callbacks is considered poor programming style. Casually speaking, it's called callback hell. As you get deeper into these callbacks, the code gets increasingly difficult to read and manage.
That said, if it works for you, go for it. You're the boss of your code. If it doesn't work for you, you can do searches to find strategies for avoiding this situation.
Data structure:
houses (collection)
name (string)
users (map)
90c234jc23 (map)
percentage: 100% (string/number)
Rules:
allow read: request.auth.uid in resource.data.users;
The problem is when I try to query houses which user owns:
FirebaseFirestore.getInstance().collection(House.COLLECTION)
// .whereArrayContains(House.USERS_FIELD, currentUser.getUid()) // does not work
.whereEqualTo("users." + currentUser.getUid(), currentUser.getUid()) // does not work either
.get()
No result are returned.
You cannot perform this type of query in firestore as there is no 'map-contains-key' operator. However, there are very simple workarounds for implementing this by making slight adjustments to your datastructure.
Specific Solution
Requirement: For this solution to work, each map value has to be uniquely identifyable in a firestore query, meaning it cannot be a map or an array.
If your case meets the listed requirements, you can go with #Dennis Alund's solution which suggests the following data structure:
{
name: "The Residence",
users: {
uid1: 80,
uid2: 20
}
}
General Solution
If your map values are maps or arrays, you need to add a property to each value which will be constant across all created values of this type. Here is an example:
{
name: "The Residence",
users: {
uid1: {
exists: true,
percentage: 80,
...
},
uid2: {
exists: true,
percentage: 20,
...
},
}
}
Now you can simply use the query:
_firestore.collection('houses').whereEqualTo('users.<uid>.exists', true)
Edit:
As #Johnny Oshika correctly pointed out, you can also use orderBy() to filter by field-name.
You can use orderBy to find documents where map contains a certain key. Using this example document:
{
"users": {
"bob": {},
"sam": {},
}
}
.orderBy('users.bob') will only find documents that contain users.bob.
This query is not working because your users field is a map and not an array.
.whereArrayContains(House.USERS_FIELD, currentUser.getUid())
This query
.whereEqualTo("users." + currentUser.getUid(), currentUser.getUid())
is not working because your map value for users.<uid> is a string that says percentage: xx% and that statement is testing if percentage: xx% === <uid>, which is false.
And that strategy will be problematic since you can not do queries to find items that "are not null" or "strings not empty", etc.
I'm assuming that the percentage is the user's ownership in the house (?). If so, you might have better luck in trying to structure your house document data like this if you want to maintain the same structure of document as in your question
{
name: "The Residence",
users: {
uid1: 80,
uid2: 20
}
}
That will allow you to do a query such as
.whereGreaterThan("users." + currentUser.getUid(), 0)
to find users that has some shares of ownership in that house.
But a fair bit of warning, as soon as you need composite indexes you will start having problems to maintain that structure. You might instead want to consider storing an array of users that owns that house for ease of querying.
I've read the Firebase docs on Stucturing Data. Data storage is cheap, but the user's time is not. We should optimize for get operations, and write in multiple places.
So then I might store a list node and a list-index node, with some duplicated data between the two, at very least the list name.
I'm using ES6 and promises in my javascript app to handle the async flow, mainly of fetching a ref key from firebase after the first data push.
let addIndexPromise = new Promise( (resolve, reject) => {
let newRef = ref.child('list-index').push(newItem);
resolve( newRef.key()); // ignore reject() for brevity
});
addIndexPromise.then( key => {
ref.child('list').child(key).set(newItem);
});
How do I make sure the data stays in sync in all places, knowing my app runs only on the client?
For sanity check, I set a setTimeout in my promise and shut my browser before it resolved, and indeed my database was no longer consistent, with an extra index saved without a corresponding list.
Any advice?
Great question. I know of three approaches to this, which I'll list below.
I'll take a slightly different example for this, mostly because it allows me to use more concrete terms in the explanation.
Say we have a chat application, where we store two entities: messages and users. In the screen where we show the messages, we also show the name of the user. So to minimize the number of reads, we store the name of the user with each chat message too.
users
so:209103
name: "Frank van Puffelen"
location: "San Francisco, CA"
questionCount: 12
so:3648524
name: "legolandbridge"
location: "London, Prague, Barcelona"
questionCount: 4
messages
-Jabhsay3487
message: "How to write denormalized data in Firebase"
user: so:3648524
username: "legolandbridge"
-Jabhsay3591
message: "Great question."
user: so:209103
username: "Frank van Puffelen"
-Jabhsay3595
message: "I know of three approaches, which I'll list below."
user: so:209103
username: "Frank van Puffelen"
So we store the primary copy of the user's profile in the users node. In the message we store the uid (so:209103 and so:3648524) so that we can look up the user. But we also store the user's name in the messages, so that we don't have to look this up for each user when we want to display a list of messages.
So now what happens when I go to the Profile page on the chat service and change my name from "Frank van Puffelen" to just "puf".
Transactional update
Performing a transactional update is the one that probably pops to mind of most developers initially. We always want the username in messages to match the name in the corresponding profile.
Using multipath writes (added on 20150925)
Since Firebase 2.3 (for JavaScript) and 2.4 (for Android and iOS), you can achieve atomic updates quite easily by using a single multi-path update:
function renameUser(ref, uid, name) {
var updates = {}; // all paths to be updated and their new values
updates['users/'+uid+'/name'] = name;
var query = ref.child('messages').orderByChild('user').equalTo(uid);
query.once('value', function(snapshot) {
snapshot.forEach(function(messageSnapshot) {
updates['messages/'+messageSnapshot.key()+'/username'] = name;
})
ref.update(updates);
});
}
This will send a single update command to Firebase that updates the user's name in their profile and in each message.
Previous atomic approach
So when the user change's the name in their profile:
var ref = new Firebase('https://mychat.firebaseio.com/');
var uid = "so:209103";
var nameInProfileRef = ref.child('users').child(uid).child('name');
nameInProfileRef.transaction(function(currentName) {
return "puf";
}, function(error, committed, snapshot) {
if (error) {
console.log('Transaction failed abnormally!', error);
} else if (!committed) {
console.log('Transaction aborted by our code.');
} else {
console.log('Name updated in profile, now update it in the messages');
var query = ref.child('messages').orderByChild('user').equalTo(uid);
query.on('child_added', function(messageSnapshot) {
messageSnapshot.ref().update({ username: "puf" });
});
}
console.log("Wilma's data: ", snapshot.val());
}, false /* don't apply the change locally */);
Pretty involved and the astute reader will notice that I cheat in the handling of the messages. First cheat is that I never call off for the listener, but I also don't use a transaction.
If we want to securely do this type of operation from the client, we'd need:
security rules that ensure the names in both places match. But the rules need to allow enough flexibility for them to temporarily be different while we're changing the name. So this turns into a pretty painful two-phase commit scheme.
change all username fields for messages by so:209103 to null (some magic value)
change the name of user so:209103 to 'puf'
change the username in every message by so:209103 that is null to puf.
that query requires an and of two conditions, which Firebase queries don't support. So we'll end up with an extra property uid_plus_name (with value so:209103_puf) that we can query on.
client-side code that handles all these transitions transactionally.
This type of approach makes my head hurt. And usually that means that I'm doing something wrong. But even if it's the right approach, with a head that hurts I'm way more likely to make coding mistakes. So I prefer to look for a simpler solution.
Eventual consistency
Update (20150925): Firebase released a feature to allow atomic writes to multiple paths. This works similar to approach below, but with a single command. See the updated section above to read how this works.
The second approach depends on splitting the user action ("I want to change my name to 'puf'") from the implications of that action ("We need to update the name in profile so:209103 and in every message that has user = so:209103).
I'd handle the rename in a script that we run on a server. The main method would be something like this:
function renameUser(ref, uid, name) {
ref.child('users').child(uid).update({ name: name });
var query = ref.child('messages').orderByChild('user').equalTo(uid);
query.once('value', function(snapshot) {
snapshot.forEach(function(messageSnapshot) {
messageSnapshot.update({ username: name });
})
});
}
Once again I take a few shortcuts here, such as using once('value' (which is in general a bad idea for optimal performance with Firebase). But overall the approach is simpler, at the cost of not having all data completely updated at the same time. But eventually the messages will all be updated to match the new value.
Not caring
The third approach is the simplest of all: in many cases you don't really have to update the duplicated data at all. In the example we've used here, you could say that each message recorded the name as I used it at that time. I didn't change my name until just now, so it makes sense that older messages show the name I used at that time. This applies in many cases where the secondary data is transactional in nature. It doesn't apply everywhere of course, but where it applies "not caring" is the simplest approach of all.
Summary
While the above are just broad descriptions of how you could solve this problem and they are definitely not complete, I find that each time I need to fan out duplicate data it comes back to one of these basic approaches.
To add to Franks great reply, I implemented the eventual consistency approach with a set of Firebase Cloud Functions. The functions get triggered whenever a primary value (eg. users name) gets changed, and then propagate the changes to the denormalized fields.
It is not as fast as a transaction, but for many cases it does not need to be.
I'm trying to test out Firebase to allow users to post comments using push. I want to display the data I retrieve with the following;
fbl.child('sell').limit(20).on("value", function(fbdata) {
// handle data display here
}
The problem is the data is returned in order of oldest to newest - I want it in reversed order. Can Firebase do this?
Since this answer was written, Firebase has added a feature that allows ordering by any child or by value. So there are now four ways to order data: by key, by value, by priority, or by the value of any named child. See this blog post that introduces the new ordering capabilities.
The basic approaches remain the same though:
1. Add a child property with the inverted timestamp and then order on that.
2. Read the children in ascending order and then invert them on the client.
Firebase supports retrieving child nodes of a collection in two ways:
by name
by priority
What you're getting now is by name, which happens to be chronological. That's no coincidence btw: when you push an item into a collection, the name is generated to ensure the children are ordered in this way. To quote the Firebase documentation for push:
The unique name generated by push() is prefixed with a client-generated timestamp so that the resulting list will be chronologically-sorted.
The Firebase guide on ordered data has this to say on the topic:
How Data is Ordered
By default, children at a Firebase node are sorted lexicographically by name. Using push() can generate child names that naturally sort chronologically, but many applications require their data to be sorted in other ways. Firebase lets developers specify the ordering of items in a list by specifying a custom priority for each item.
The simplest way to get the behavior you want is to also specify an always-decreasing priority when you add the item:
var ref = new Firebase('https://your.firebaseio.com/sell');
var item = ref.push();
item.setWithPriority(yourObject, 0 - Date.now());
Update
You'll also have to retrieve the children differently:
fbl.child('sell').startAt().limitToLast(20).on('child_added', function(fbdata) {
console.log(fbdata.exportVal());
})
In my test using on('child_added' ensures that the last few children added are returned in reverse chronological order. Using on('value' on the other hand, returns them in the order of their name.
Be sure to read the section "Reading ordered data", which explains the usage of the child_* events to retrieve (ordered) children.
A bin to demonstrate this: http://jsbin.com/nonawe/3/watch?js,console
Since firebase 2.0.x you can use limitLast() to achieve that:
fbl.child('sell').orderByValue().limitLast(20).on("value", function(fbdataSnapshot) {
// fbdataSnapshot is returned in the ascending order
// you will still need to order these 20 items in
// in a descending order
}
Here's a link to the announcement: More querying capabilities in Firebase
To augment Frank's answer, it's also possible to grab the most recent records--even if you haven't bothered to order them using priorities--by simply using endAt().limit(x) like this demo:
var fb = new Firebase(URL);
// listen for all changes and update
fb.endAt().limit(100).on('value', update);
// print the output of our array
function update(snap) {
var list = [];
snap.forEach(function(ss) {
var data = ss.val();
data['.priority'] = ss.getPriority();
data['.name'] = ss.name();
list.unshift(data);
});
// print/process the results...
}
Note that this is quite performant even up to perhaps a thousand records (assuming the payloads are small). For more robust usages, Frank's answer is authoritative and much more scalable.
This brute force can also be optimized to work with bigger data or more records by doing things like monitoring child_added/child_removed/child_moved events in lieu of value, and using a debounce to apply DOM updates in bulk instead of individually.
DOM updates, naturally, are a stinker regardless of the approach, once you get into the hundreds of elements, so the debounce approach (or a React.js solution, which is essentially an uber debounce) is a great tool to have.
There is really no way but seems we have the recyclerview we can have this
query=mCommentsReference.orderByChild("date_added");
query.keepSynced(true);
// Initialize Views
mRecyclerView = (RecyclerView) view.findViewById(R.id.recyclerView);
mManager = new LinearLayoutManager(getContext());
// mManager.setReverseLayout(false);
mManager.setReverseLayout(true);
mManager.setStackFromEnd(true);
mRecyclerView.setHasFixedSize(true);
mRecyclerView.setLayoutManager(mManager);
I have a date variable (long) and wanted to keep the newest items on top of the list. So what I did was:
Add a new long field 'dateInverse'
Add a new method called 'getDateInverse', which just returns: Long.MAX_VALUE - date;
Create my query with: .orderByChild("dateInverse")
Presto! :p
You are searching limitTolast(Int x) .This will give you the last "x" higher elements of your database (they are in ascending order) but they are the "x" higher elements
if you got in your database {10,300,150,240,2,24,220}
this method:
myFirebaseRef.orderByChild("highScore").limitToLast(4)
will retrive you : {150,220,240,300}
In Android there is a way to actually reverse the data in an Arraylist of objects through the Adapter. In my case I could not use the LayoutManager to reverse the results in descending order since I was using a horizontal Recyclerview to display the data. Setting the following parameters to the recyclerview messed up my UI experience:
llManager.setReverseLayout(true);
llManager.setStackFromEnd(true);
The only working way I found around this was through the BindViewHolder method of the RecyclerView adapter:
#Override
public void onBindViewHolder(final RecyclerView.ViewHolder holder, int position) {
final SuperPost superPost = superList.get(getItemCount() - position - 1);
}
Hope this answer will help all the devs out there who are struggling with this issue in Firebase.
Firebase: How to display a thread of items in reverse order with a limit for each request and an indicator for a "load more" button.
This will get the last 10 items of the list
FBRef.child("childName")
.limitToLast(loadMoreLimit) // loadMoreLimit = 10 for example
This will get the last 10 items. Grab the id of the last record in the list and save for the load more functionality. Next, convert the collection of objects into and an array and do a list.reverse().
LOAD MORE Functionality: The next call will do two things, it will get the next sequence of list items based on the reference id from the first request and give you an indicator if you need to display the "load more" button.
this.FBRef
.child("childName")
.endAt(null, lastThreadId) // Get this from the previous step
.limitToLast(loadMoreLimit+2)
You will need to strip the first and last item of this object collection. The first item is the reference to get this list. The last item is an indicator for the show more button.
I have a bunch of other logic that will keep everything clean. You will need to add this code only for the load more functionality.
list = snapObjectAsArray; // The list is an array from snapObject
lastItemId = key; // get the first key of the list
if (list.length < loadMoreLimit+1) {
lastItemId = false;
}
if (list.length > loadMoreLimit+1) {
list.pop();
}
if (list.length > loadMoreLimit) {
list.shift();
}
// Return the list.reverse() and lastItemId
// If lastItemId is an ID, it will be used for the next reference and a flag to show the "load more" button.
}
I'm using ReactFire for easy Firebase integration.
Basically, it helps me storing the datas into the component state, as an array. Then, all I have to use is the reverse() function (read more)
Here is how I achieve this :
import React, { Component, PropTypes } from 'react';
import ReactMixin from 'react-mixin';
import ReactFireMixin from 'reactfire';
import Firebase from '../../../utils/firebaseUtils'; // Firebase.initializeApp(config);
#ReactMixin.decorate(ReactFireMixin)
export default class Add extends Component {
constructor(args) {
super(args);
this.state = {
articles: []
};
}
componentWillMount() {
let ref = Firebase.database().ref('articles').orderByChild('insertDate').limitToLast(10);
this.bindAsArray(ref, 'articles'); // bind retrieved data to this.state.articles
}
render() {
return (
<div>
{
this.state.articles.reverse().map(function(article) {
return <div>{article.title}</div>
})
}
</div>
);
}
}
There is a better way. You should order by negative server timestamp. How to get negative server timestamp even offline? There is an hidden field which helps. Related snippet from documentation:
var offsetRef = new Firebase("https://<YOUR-FIREBASE-APP>.firebaseio.com/.info/serverTimeOffset");
offsetRef.on("value", function(snap) {
var offset = snap.val();
var estimatedServerTimeMs = new Date().getTime() + offset;
});
To add to Dave Vávra's answer, I use a negative timestamp as my sort_key like so
Setting
const timestamp = new Date().getTime();
const data = {
name: 'John Doe',
city: 'New York',
sort_key: timestamp * -1 // Gets the negative value of the timestamp
}
Getting
const ref = firebase.database().ref('business-images').child(id);
const query = ref.orderByChild('sort_key');
return $firebaseArray(query); // AngularFire function
This fetches all objects from newest to oldest. You can also $indexOn the sortKey to make it run even faster
I had this problem too, I found a very simple solution to this that doesn't involved manipulating the data in anyway. If you are rending the result to the DOM, in a list of some sort. You can use flexbox and setup a class to reverse the elements in their container.
.reverse {
display: flex;
flex-direction: column-reverse;
}
myarray.reverse(); or this.myitems = items.map(item => item).reverse();
I did this by prepend.
query.orderByChild('sell').limitToLast(4).on("value", function(snapshot){
snapshot.forEach(function (childSnapshot) {
// PREPEND
});
});
Someone has pointed out that there are 2 ways to do this:
Manipulate the data client-side
Make a query that will order the data
The easiest way that I have found to do this is to use option 1, but through a LinkedList. I just append each of the objects to the front of the stack. It is flexible enough to still allow the list to be used in a ListView or RecyclerView. This way even though they come in order oldest to newest, you can still view, or retrieve, newest to oldest.
You can add a column named orderColumn where you save time as
Long refrenceTime = "large future time";
Long currentTime = "currentTime";
Long order = refrenceTime - currentTime;
now save Long order in column named orderColumn and when you retrieve data
as orderBy(orderColumn) you will get what you need.
just use reverse() on the array , suppose if you are storing the values to an array items[] then do a this.items.reverse()
ref.subscribe(snapshots => {
this.loading.dismiss();
this.items = [];
snapshots.forEach(snapshot => {
this.items.push(snapshot);
});
**this.items.reverse();**
},
For me it was limitToLast that worked. I also found out that limitLast is NOT a function:)
const query = messagesRef.orderBy('createdAt', 'asc').limitToLast(25);
The above is what worked for me.
PRINT in reverse order
Let's think outside the box... If your information will be printed directly into user's screen (without any content that needs to be modified in a consecutive order, like a sum or something), simply print from bottom to top.
So, instead of inserting each new block of content to the end of the print space (A += B), add that block to the beginning (A = B+A).
If you'll include the elements as a consecutive ordered list, the DOM can put the numbers for you if you insert each element as a List Item (<li>) inside an Ordered Lists (<ol>).
This way you save space from your database, avoiding unnecesary reversed data.