i have 3 tables [users, tracks, trackLikers]. when user like a track it added to trackLikers like this.
tracklikers
703486
AXweXLKIQiQYmwia5TbvNbSLk472: Alex
AXweXLKIQiQYmwia5TbvNbSLk472: John
704875
AXweXLKIQiQYmwia5TbvNbSLk472: Alex
Now i want to get how many tracks "Alex" likes. So i do it like this.
dbReference.child("tracklikers").orderByChild("AXweXLKIQiQYmwia5TbvNbSLk472").equalTo("Alex").
Ok fine i got the result of 2 tracks id [703486, 704875]. But the problem is i also got the John in 703486 result. So if i could have one million likes on this track i will have to retrive all likers :-(. So any one have solution how to solve this problem. Or only i can get the track id without all likers values ?
if there is no solution so unfortunately i have to switch to relational database :-(.
You should have another node such as user-tracks to keep tracks which are liked by user.
user-tracks
- AXweXLKIQiQYmwia5TbvNbSLk472 // userId
- 703486 // track which user liked
I develop app in kinetise tool and I found it is possible to easly add list with Google spreadsheet content. But I don't know whether it is possible to edit sheets from user account (when it is public or user sign up with Google). Let's say add records for specific position (A1) in specific sheet (SheetName). How to achieve this?
Yes, you can both view your spreadsheet (read) and edit it (write) in Kinetise.
Firstly, publish your sheet and get public URL address (File -> Publish to web).
Now in Kinetise editor add List widget and select "From Google Sheets" in Online source view. Paste your URL address and data from sheet should be displayed.
What about write, well you need to Sign-In with Google first. So please add Google login method to your application. You can do this attaching Google login widget to your Splash Screen.
Then in screen where you want to edit sheet please add Form widget. Select "To RESTful API" as form send destination. Paste below url:
https://sheets.googleapis.com/v4/spreadsheets/{spreadsheetId}/values/{range}:append?insertDataOption=INSERT_ROWS&valueInputOption=USER_ENTERED&access_token=##GetGoogleUserAccessToken##
where
{spreadsheetId} - yours spreadsheet ID (same as in List widget's URL);
{range} - columns range: A1:B1 (depends on number of columns in your table).
The last thing you have to do is to edit send request body. Please click Settings button on the right of URL address. In Body tab and Request body transform section please paste:
{ "values": [
[ .form.field1, .form.field2 ]
]
}
field1 and field2 are names of form fields, so if you have another names or more columns please change it. And that's all, now you should be able to edit spreadsheet.
I have a quick question about the best practices for data structure in a firebase database.
I want users of my app to be able to maintain a friends list. The firebase documentation recommends creating a schema (not sure if thats the proper word in this context) that is as flat as possible. Because of this I thought it would be a good idea to separate the friends section from the player section in the database like so:
{
"players":{
"player1id":{
"username":"john",...
},
"player2id": ...,
"player3id": ...
}
"friends": {
"player1id"{
"friends":{
"friend1Id":true,
"friend2Id":true
}
},
}
"player2id"{
"friends":{
"friend1Id":true,
"friend2Id":true
}
},
}
}
So my questions are as follows:
Is this a good design for my schema?
When pulling a friends list for one player, will the friends lists of EVERY player be pulled? and if so, can this be avoided?
Also, what would be the best way to then pull in additional information about the friends once the app has all of their IDs. e.g. getting all of their user names which will be stored as a string in their player profile.
Is this a good design for my schema?
You're already thinking in the right direction. However the "friends" node can be simplified to:
"friends": {
"player1id": {
"friend1Id":true,
"friend2Id":true
}
}
Remember that Firebase node names cannot use the character dot (.). So if your IDs are integer such as 1, 2, and 3 everything is OK, but if the IDs are username be careful (for example "super123" is OK but "super.duper" is not)
When pulling a friends list for one player, will the friends lists of EVERY player be pulled? and if so, can this be avoided?
No. If you pull /friends/1 it obviously won't pull /friends/2 etc.
Also, what would be the best way to then pull in additional information about the friends once the app has all of their IDs. e.g. getting all of their user names which will be stored as a string in their player profile.
Loop through the IDs and fetch the respective nodes from Firebase again. For example if user 1 has friends 2, 3, and 4, then using a for loop fetch /players/2, /players/3, and /players/4
Since firebase pull works asynchronously, you might need to use a counter or some other mechanism so that when the last data is pulled you can continue running the completion code.
I started developing simple app to learn Firebase, I followed cool blog post: https://firebase.googleblog.com/2013/04/denormalizing-your-data-is-normal.html
In my app, I want to store user profiles (its extension of firebase user) and relationship between users (something like friendship)
I came up with this data structure idea:
profile
profile1:
userName:"User 1",
userDescription: "User 1 description"
profile2:
userName:"User 2",
userDescription: "User 2 description"
profile3:
userName:"User 3",
userDescription: "User 3 description"
profileFriends:
profile1:
profile2: true
profile2:
profile1: true
profile3: true
profile3:
profile2: true
Of course instead of profile1 I use pushed keys.
I wonder I its okay for such a use case - I want to display all friends of profile2.
I have to get Database reference to
"profileFriends/profile2"
And then iterating childs gives me keys: profile1 and profile3 which I can then listen using reference
"profile/profile1"
"profile/profile3"
Since Im working in Android, I can wrap all this code and use Observable that emits profiles.
Question: Do I get this right? I have some SQL background and standard request-response api experience, Im just little worried if my user have 100 friends Ill need to make total 101 listeners - is it similar to make 101 requests? Is there any smarter way to solve "join" in non-joinable no-sql database?
I guess another solution is denormalization, but I'm not a big fan of updating many places to change for example profile description
I want to create a simple search in my app, but cannot find anything on interwebs about it, that's more recent than 2014. There must be a better way. There are startAt and endAt functions but they don't work as expected and are case sensitive. How do you guys solve this problem? How can this functionality still not exist in 2016?
In my case I was able to partly achieve a SQL LIKE in the following way:
databaseReference.orderByChild('_searchLastName')
.startAt(queryText)
.endAt(queryText+"\uf8ff")
The character \uf8ff used in the query is a very high code point in the Unicode range (it is a Private Usage Area [PUA] code). Because it is after most regular characters in Unicode, the query matches all values that start with queryText.
In this way, searching by "Fre" I could get the records having "Fred, Freddy, Frey" as value in _searchLastName property from the database.
Create two String variables
searchInputToLower = inputText.getText().toString().toLowerCase();
searchInputTOUpper = inputText.getText().toString().toUpperCase();
Then in the Query set it to:
DatabaseReference reference = FirebaseDatabase.getInstance().getReference().child("Products");//Your firebase node you want to search inside..
FirebaseRecyclerOptions<Products> options =
new FirebaseRecyclerOptions.Builder<Products>()//the Products is a class that get and set Strings from Firebase Database.
.setQuery(reference.orderByChild("name").startAt(searchInputUpper).endAt(searchInputLower + "\uf8ff"),Products.class)
.build();
the "name" it's the node inside the Products Main Node.
the .startAt(searchInputUpper) & .endAt(searchInputLower + "\uf8ff") to make the search as contains all characters that typed in the inputText.getText() that you get.
finally I got it you can use where clause to get you result like SQL
LIKE keyword like% or %like
syntax :
Firestore.collection(collectionName).orderBy(field).where(field, ">=", keyword.toUpperCase()).where(field, "<=", keyword.toUpperCase() + "\uf8ff").get()
I my case used:
var query = 'text'
databaseReference.orderByChild('search_name')
.startAt(`%${query}%`)
.endAt(query+"\uf8ff")
.once("value")
In this way, searching by "test" I could get the records having "Test 1, Contest, One test" as value in 'search' property from the database.
Firebase is noSQL therefore it does not have searches built in like you'll find in SQL. You can either sort by values/key or you can equalto
https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/android/retrieve-data
You can find examples at the link above. That is the latest documentation for firebase.
If you are looking for SQL like searches. Then take a look at elastic search. But that will increase the complexity since you need a platform to put it on. For that i could recommend Heroku or maybe GoogleCloudServers
Here is a blog post about advanced searches with elastic search
https://firebase.googleblog.com/2014/01/queries-part-2-advanced-searches-with.html
This question might be old but there is a documented way of how to achieve this way, It is simple to implement. Quoted:
To enable full text search of your Cloud Firestore data, use a third-party search service like Algolia. Consider a note-taking app where each note is a document:
Algolia will be part of your firebase functions and will do all the searches you want.
// Update the search index every time a blog post is written.
exports.onNoteCreated = functions.firestore.document('notes/{noteId}').onCreate(event => {
// Get the note document
const note = event.data.data();
// Add an 'objectID' field which Algolia requires
note.objectID = event.params.noteId;
// Write to the algolia index
const index = client.initIndex(ALGOLIA_INDEX_NAME);
return index.saveObject(note);
});
To implement the search, the best way is to use instant search - android
Sample Search Image: GIF
The feature you're looking for is called full-text search and this is something most databases (including Firebase) don't provide out-of-the-box because it requires storing the data in a format that's optimized for text search (vs optimized for filtering) - these are two different problem sets with a different set of trade-offs.
So you would have to use a separate full-text search engine in conjunction with Firebase to be able to do this, especially if you need features like faceting, typo tolerance, merchandizing, etc.
You have a few options for a full-text search engine:
There's Algolia which is easy to get up and running but can get expensive quickly
There's ElasticSearch which has a steep learning curve but uber flexible
There's Typesense which aims to be an open source alternative to Algolia.
I don't know about the certainty of this approach but using the firebase version 10.2.6 on android, i get to do something like this:
firebaseDatabase.getReference("parent")
.orderByChild("childNode")
.startAt("[a-zA-Z0-9]*")
.endAt(searchString)
It seems to work well sometimes
Finally joined SO just to answer this.
For anyone coming here from/for the python firestore.client here's a solution that seems to work for me.
It's based on the accepted answer's concept but via the client rather than db.reference() and mixed with the answer from user12750908.
from firebase_admin import firestore
users = db.collection("users")\
.order_by("last_name")\
.where("last_name", ">=", last_name.upper())\
.where("last_name", "<=", last_name.lower() + "\uf8ff")\
.stream()
It works for the simple test I did, but I'll update my answer if I have issues with it later. And just a reminder, this is similar to
LIKE search%
and not
LIKE %search%.
Edit 1
I didn't see any tags for the question, but the title attribute mentions Android so this may not necessarily answer the question directly, but if you have a python API, this should work. I'm unfortunately not sure if there's an equivalent client/db separation in the Android version like there is in the Firebase Admin for Python. I didn't want to delete the answer since I hadn't seen any answers for firestore client during my search for a similar answer and hope it helps anyone else stumbling around.
Edit 09-03-2020 This works a portion of the time it seems. Most of the time I didn't seem to have an issue, but when I applied it to another project I was getting unexpected results. Long story short you may need to replicate how you save the data you're comparing against. For example, you may need to have a field to save the last_name in all caps and another field to save it in all lowercase, then you change the first where clause to compare last_name_upper and the second to compare last_name_lowercase. In my second project so far this seems to yield more accurate results so you may want to give that a try if the previous answer doesn't work well
EDIT 09-07-2020 Previous edit from 09-03-2020 is partially accurate. During my haste of thinking I had it fully resolved I completely forgot firebase doesn't let you use <, >, <=, >= across different fields. You may need to do two queries and merge them, but you'd probably still be reading more docs than you really intend. Doing the comparison against either the upper or lower version with the appropriate search term seems to give the original results expected from the original answer. For example:
.orderBy("last_name_upper")
.where("last_name_upper", ">=", this.searchForm.text.toUpperCase())
.where("last_name_upper", "<=", this.searchForm.text.toUpperCase() + "\uf8ff")
As firebase documentation, firebase doesn't support full text search.
But to do that you can use third-party tools.
Check this link to learn more https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/solutions/search