I am using the onUpdate event handler in Firebase Cloud Functions for the Realtime Database. Works great and I get the before / after snapshot values from the change object, as depicted here :
Before change : { '-M0ONRMFJxvClvoFnHP_': true, '-MNxnG-xnFrYOoU_H0U7': false }
After change : { '-M0ONRMFJxvClvoFnHP_': true }
I am curious if there's an "easy" way to get the diff or patch equivalent for this update operation ? Do I have to dive through the Javascript rabbit-hole and dig up a library (any suggestions ?) or is there a built-in feature inside the change object ?
Note : there's a reference to a fieldMask but I am not really seeing any ways to set this up (doesn't seem documented).
Thanks !
Well, I didn't find anything too exciting, so I just wrote the following that fits my specific purpose :
let beforeKeys = Object.keys(change.before.val() || {});
let afterKeys = Object.keys(change.after.val() || {});
let deletions = [];
let insertions = [];
deletions = beforeKeys.filter(item => !afterKeys.includes(item));
insertions = afterKeys.filter(item => !beforeKeys.includes(item));
and then I mapped the elements of each array to an async call for removal and addition to specific references in my realtime DB.
There's probably a more efficient way to achieve this, but that should work for now.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. 🙄
Related
I am trying to grab information from my firebase database after a particular intent is invoked in my conversation flow.
I am trying to make a function which takes a parameter of user ID, which will then get the highscore for that user, and then say that users highscore back to them.
app.intent('get-highscore', (conv) => {
var thisUsersHighestscore = fetchHighscoreByUserId(conv.user.id);
conv.ask('your highest score is ${thisUsersHighestScore}, say continue to keep playing.');
});
function fetchHighscoreByUserId(userId){
var highscoresRef = database.ref("highscores");
var thisUsersHighscore;
highscoresRef.on('value',function(snap){
var allHighscores= snap.val();
thisUsersHighscore = allHighscores.users.userId.highscore;
});
return thisUsersHighscore;
}
An example of the data in the database:
"highscores" : {
"users" : {
"1539261356999999924819020" : {
"highscore" : 2,
"nickname" : "default"
},
"15393362381293223232222738" : {
"highscore" : 78,
"nickname" : "quiz master"
},
"15393365724084067696560" : {
"highscore" : "32",
"nickname" : "cutie pie"
},
"45343453535534534353" : {
"highscore" : 1,
"nickname" : "friendly man"
}
}
}
It seems like it is never setting any value to thisUsersHighScore in my function.
You have a number of issues going on here - both with how you're using Firebase, how you're using Actions on Google, and how you're using Javascript. Some of these issues are just that you could be doing things better and more efficiently, while others are causing actual problems.
Accessing values in a structure in JavaScript
The first problem is that allHighscores.users.userId.highscore means "In an object named 'allHighscores', get the property named 'users', from the result of that, get the property named 'userId'". But there is no property named "userId" - there are just a bunch of properties named after a number.
You probably wanted something more like allHighscores.users[userId].highscore, which means "In an object named 'allHighscores', get the property named 'users', fromt he result of that, get the property named by the value of 'userId'".
But if this has thousands or hundreds of thousands of records, this will take up a lot of memory. And will take a lot of time to fetch from Firebase. Wouldn't it be better if you just fetched that one record directly from Firebase?
Two Firebase Issues
From above, you should probably just be fetching one record from Firebase, rather than the whole table and then searching for the one record you want. In firebase, this means you get a reference to the path of the data you want, and then request the value.
To specify the path you want, you might do something like
var userRef = database.ref("highscores/users").child(userId);
var userScoreRef = userRef.child( "highscore" );
(You can, of course, put these in one statement. I broke them up like this for clarity.)
Once you have the reference, however, you want to read the data that is at that reference. You have two issues here.
You're using the on() method, which fetches the value once, but then also sets up a callback to be called every time the score updates. You probably don't need the latter, so you can use the once() method to get the value once.
You have a callback function setup to get the value (which is good, since this is an async operation, and this is the traditional way to handle async operations in Javascript), but you're returning a value outside of that callback. So you're always returning an empty value.
These suggest that you need to make fetchHighScoreByUserId() an asynchronous function as well, and the way we have to do this now is to return a Promise. This Promise will then resolve to an actual value when the async function completes. Fortunately, the Firebase library can return a Promise, and we can get its value as part of the .then() clause in the response, so we can simplify things a lot. (I strongly suggest you read up on Promises in Javascript and how to use them.) It might look something like this:
return userScoreRef.once("value")
.then( function(scoreSnapshot){
var score = scoreSnapshot.val();
return score;
} );
Async functions and Actions on Google
In the Intent Handler, you have a similar problem as above. The call to fetchHighScoreByUserId() is async, so it doesn't finish running (or returning a value) by the time you call conv.ask() or return from the function. AoG needs to know to wait for an async call to finish. How can it do that? Promises again!
AoG Intent Handlers must return a Promise if there is an asyc call involved.
Since the modified fetchHighScoreByUserId() returns a Promise, we will leverage that. We'll also set our response in the .then() part of the Promise chain. It might look something like this:
app.intent('get-highscore', (conv) => {
return fetchHighscoreByUserId(conv.user.id)
.then( function(highScore){
conv.ask(`Your highest score is ${highScore}. Do you want to play again?`);
} );
});
Two asides here:
You need to use backticks "`" to define the string if you're trying to use ${highScore} like that.
The phrase "Say continue if you want to play again." is a very poor Voice User Interface. Better is directly asking if they want to play again.
You can get the child count via
firebase_node.once('value', function(snapshot) { alert('Count: ' + snapshot.numChildren()); });
But I believe this fetches the entire sub-tree of that node from the server. For huge lists, that seems RAM and latency intensive. Is there a way of getting the count (and/or a list of child names) without fetching the whole thing?
The code snippet you gave does indeed load the entire set of data and then counts it client-side, which can be very slow for large amounts of data.
Firebase doesn't currently have a way to count children without loading data, but we do plan to add it.
For now, one solution would be to maintain a counter of the number of children and update it every time you add a new child. You could use a transaction to count items, like in this code tracking upvodes:
var upvotesRef = new Firebase('https://docs-examples.firebaseio.com/android/saving-data/fireblog/posts/-JRHTHaIs-jNPLXOQivY/upvotes');
upvotesRef.transaction(function (current_value) {
return (current_value || 0) + 1;
});
For more info, see https://www.firebase.com/docs/transactions.html
UPDATE:
Firebase recently released Cloud Functions. With Cloud Functions, you don't need to create your own Server. You can simply write JavaScript functions and upload it to Firebase. Firebase will be responsible for triggering functions whenever an event occurs.
If you want to count upvotes for example, you should create a structure similar to this one:
{
"posts" : {
"-JRHTHaIs-jNPLXOQivY" : {
"upvotes_count":5,
"upvotes" : {
"userX" : true,
"userY" : true,
"userZ" : true,
...
}
}
}
}
And then write a javascript function to increase the upvotes_count when there is a new write to the upvotes node.
const functions = require('firebase-functions');
const admin = require('firebase-admin');
admin.initializeApp(functions.config().firebase);
exports.countlikes = functions.database.ref('/posts/$postid/upvotes').onWrite(event => {
return event.data.ref.parent.child('upvotes_count').set(event.data.numChildren());
});
You can read the Documentation to know how to Get Started with Cloud Functions.
Also, another example of counting posts is here:
https://github.com/firebase/functions-samples/blob/master/child-count/functions/index.js
Update January 2018
The firebase docs have changed so instead of event we now have change and context.
The given example throws an error complaining that event.data is undefined. This pattern seems to work better:
exports.countPrescriptions = functions.database.ref(`/prescriptions`).onWrite((change, context) => {
const data = change.after.val();
const count = Object.keys(data).length;
return change.after.ref.child('_count').set(count);
});
```
This is a little late in the game as several others have already answered nicely, but I'll share how I might implement it.
This hinges on the fact that the Firebase REST API offers a shallow=true parameter.
Assume you have a post object and each one can have a number of comments:
{
"posts": {
"$postKey": {
"comments": {
...
}
}
}
}
You obviously don't want to fetch all of the comments, just the number of comments.
Assuming you have the key for a post, you can send a GET request to
https://yourapp.firebaseio.com/posts/[the post key]/comments?shallow=true.
This will return an object of key-value pairs, where each key is the key of a comment and its value is true:
{
"comment1key": true,
"comment2key": true,
...,
"comment9999key": true
}
The size of this response is much smaller than requesting the equivalent data, and now you can calculate the number of keys in the response to find your value (e.g. commentCount = Object.keys(result).length).
This may not completely solve your problem, as you are still calculating the number of keys returned, and you can't necessarily subscribe to the value as it changes, but it does greatly reduce the size of the returned data without requiring any changes to your schema.
Save the count as you go - and use validation to enforce it. I hacked this together - for keeping a count of unique votes and counts which keeps coming up!. But this time I have tested my suggestion! (notwithstanding cut/paste errors!).
The 'trick' here is to use the node priority to as the vote count...
The data is:
vote/$issueBeingVotedOn/user/$uniqueIdOfVoter = thisVotesCount, priority=thisVotesCount
vote/$issueBeingVotedOn/count = 'user/'+$idOfLastVoter, priority=CountofLastVote
,"vote": {
".read" : true
,".write" : true
,"$issue" : {
"user" : {
"$user" : {
".validate" : "!data.exists() &&
newData.val()==data.parent().parent().child('count').getPriority()+1 &&
newData.val()==newData.GetPriority()"
user can only vote once && count must be one higher than current count && data value must be same as priority.
}
}
,"count" : {
".validate" : "data.parent().child(newData.val()).val()==newData.getPriority() &&
newData.getPriority()==data.getPriority()+1 "
}
count (last voter really) - vote must exist and its count equal newcount, && newcount (priority) can only go up by one.
}
}
Test script to add 10 votes by different users (for this example, id's faked, should user auth.uid in production). Count down by (i--) 10 to see validation fail.
<script src='https://cdn.firebase.com/v0/firebase.js'></script>
<script>
window.fb = new Firebase('https:...vote/iss1/');
window.fb.child('count').once('value', function (dss) {
votes = dss.getPriority();
for (var i=1;i<10;i++) vote(dss,i+votes);
} );
function vote(dss,count)
{
var user='user/zz' + count; // replace with auth.id or whatever
window.fb.child(user).setWithPriority(count,count);
window.fb.child('count').setWithPriority(user,count);
}
</script>
The 'risk' here is that a vote is cast, but the count not updated (haking or script failure). This is why the votes have a unique 'priority' - the script should really start by ensuring that there is no vote with priority higher than the current count, if there is it should complete that transaction before doing its own - get your clients to clean up for you :)
The count needs to be initialised with a priority before you start - forge doesn't let you do this, so a stub script is needed (before the validation is active!).
write a cloud function to and update the node count.
// below function to get the given node count.
const functions = require('firebase-functions');
const admin = require('firebase-admin');
admin.initializeApp(functions.config().firebase);
exports.userscount = functions.database.ref('/users/')
.onWrite(event => {
console.log('users number : ', event.data.numChildren());
return event.data.ref.parent.child('count/users').set(event.data.numChildren());
});
Refer :https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions/database-events
root--|
|-users ( this node contains all users list)
|
|-count
|-userscount :
(this node added dynamically by cloud function with the user count)
I want select from Firestore collection just articles written NOT by me.
Is it really so hard?
Every article has field "owner_uid".
Thats it: I JUST want to write equivalent to "select * from articles where uid<>request.auth.uid"
TL;DR: solution found already: usages for languages/platforms: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/query-data/queries#kotlin+ktx_5
EDIT Sep 18 2020
The Firebase release notes suggest there are now not-in and != queries. (Proper documentation is now available.)
not-in finds documents where a specified field’s value is not in a specified array.
!= finds documents where a specified field's value does not equal the specified value.
Neither query operator will match documents where the specified field is not present. Be sure the see the documentation for the syntax for your language.
ORIGINAL ANSWER
Firestore doesn't provide inequality checks. According to the documentation:
The where() method takes three parameters: a field to filter on, a comparison operation, and a value. The comparison can be <, <=, ==, >, or >=.
Inequality operations don't scale like other operations that use an index. Firestore indexes are good for range queries. With this type of index, for an inequality query, the backend would still have to scan every document in the collection in order to come up with results, and that's extremely bad for performance when the number of documents grows large.
If you need to filter your results to remove particular items, you can still do that locally.
You also have the option of using multiple queries to exclude a distinct value. Something like this, if you want everything except 12. Query for value < 12, then query for value > 12, then merge the results in the client.
For android it should be easy implement with Task Api.
Newbie example:
FirebaseFirestore db = FirebaseFirestore.getInstance();
Query lessQuery = db.collection("users").whereLessThan("uid", currentUid);
Query greaterQuery = db.collection("users").whereGreaterThan("uid", currentUid);
Task lessQuery Task = firstQuery.get();
Task greaterQuery = secondQuery.get();
Task combinedTask = Tasks.whenAllSuccess(lessQuery , greaterQuery)
.addOnSuccessListener(new OnSuccessListener<List<Object>>() {
#Override
public void onSuccess(List<Object> list) {
//This is the list of "users" collection without user with currentUid
}
});
Also, with this you can combine any set of queries.
For web there is rxfire
This is an example of how I solved the problem in JavaScript:
let articlesToDisplay = await db
.collection('articles')
.get()
.then((snapshot) => {
let notMyArticles = snapshot.docs.filter( (article) =>
article.data().owner_uid !== request.auth.uid
)
return notMyArticles
})
It fetches all documents and uses Array.prototype.filter() to filter out the ones you don't want. This can be run server-side or client-side.
Updating the answer of Darren G, which caused "TypeError: Converting circular structure to JSON". When we perform the filter operation, the whole firebase object was added back to the array instead of just the data. We can solve this by chaining the filter method with the map method.
let articles = []
let articlesRefs = await db.collection('articles').get();
articles = articlesRefs.docs
.filter((article) => article.data.uid !== request.auth.uid) //Get Filtered Docs
.map((article) => article.data()); //Process Docs to Data
return articles
FYI: This is an expensive operation because you will fetching all the articles from database and then filtering them locallly.
Track all user id in a single document (or two)
filter unwanted id out
Use "where in"
var mylistofidwherenotme = // code to fetch the single document where you tracked all user id, then filter yourself out
database.collection("articles").where("blogId", "in", mylistofidwherenotme)
let query = docRef.where('role','>',user_role).where('role','<',user_role).get()
This is not functioning as the "not equal" operation in firestore with string values
You can filter the array of objects within the javascript code.
var data=[Object,Object,Object] // this is your object array
var newArray = data.filter(function(el) {
return el.gender != 'Male';
});
I want to clean up this userPublic by deleting all of its child node which has isTesting == true. I am using Firebase's cloud function. My approach would be :
const userPublic = admin.database().ref("/userPublic")
const testsInUserPublic = userPublic.orderByChild("isTesting").equalTo(true)
testsInUserPublic.once("value", dataSnapshot => {
// ???
})
Since I can only call .remove() on reference and not snapshot but to filter the child I want it returns snapshot, how can I get the reference from snapshot? (I would like to know the key XXX-XXX-XXX of each filtered child, so I can concatenate with userPublic and .remove() them one by one)
Also, even if I can get all the references that I want to remove I think deleting them one by one by calling .remove() then wait for promise, then call the next one does not sounds like an optimal way. Are there any way to remove all of them in one go?
If it involves calling .update() on the top userPublic node, I would have to fetch everything, remove the one with isTesting and then put the remaining back for update. This sounds like it is not efficient compared to the filtering way. As eventually the one with .isTesting is only about 5% of all data. Or is this actually the approach everyone is using?
You're almost there. All that's left is to create a single multi-location update from the results of your query:
const userPublic = admin.database().ref("/userPublic")
const testsInUserPublic = userPublic.orderByChild("isTesting").equalTo(true)
testsInUserPublic.once("value", snapshot => {
var updates = {};
snapshot.forEach(function(child) {
updates["/userPublic/"+child.key] = null;
});
userPublic.update(updates);
})
Doing this with promises would not be too different:
testsInUserPublic.once("value", snapshot => {
var promises = [];
snapshot.forEach(function(child) {
promises.push(child.ref.remove());
});
Promise.all(promises); // this returns a promise that resolves once all deletes are done, or that rejects once one of them fails
})
Performance of this will be very similar, since Firebase pipelines the requests over a single connection. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35931526/speed-up-fetching-posts-for-my-social-network-app-by-using-query-instead-of-obse/35932786#35932786
So I have this:
Template.cards.cards = function () {
var deck = Deck.findOne({active: 1});
var cards = Cards.find({deck_id: deck['_id']}).fetch();
return cards;
}
But "deck" is returning undefined, even though calling the same query from the browser console returns results.
I feel like this is a reactivity issue and there is something fundamentally wrong with how I'm going about achieving this. It feels like a very relational way to go about things, I'm new to non-relational data storage too. I feel like there might be something fundamentally wrong with the way I'm going about this but I'm new to Meteor, I've trawled through the docs but can't find where I might be going wrong. Any help is greatly appreciated.
If you try to access your Deck subscription right away at startup, it's possible that the data hasn't loaded yet. You can use a callback in the subscribe method to ensure you have data:
Meteor.subscribe("deck", function () {
Session.set("activeDeck", 1);
};
Template.cards.cards = function () {
var deck = Deck.findOne({ active: Session.get("activeDeck") });
var cards = Cards.find({ deck_id: deck['_id'] }).fetch();
return cards;
};
Perhaps you want to change this to subscribe to decks and then store a deck id instead of just an active flag in your session.
Hope this helps.
[1] First of all, check the datatype of active you are passing. If it is a string then {active: 1} will result in false and the query will return no results. And the deck will remain undefined .
[2] Try alternative way of findOne as : Deck.find({active: 1}).fetch()[0]; This will return same result as Deck.findOne({active: 1});
[3] ThefindOne() and find().fetch()[0] returns object which has properties and the valid way of referencing the property of objects is objectName.propertyName, So replace deck['_id'] with deck._id in Cards.find({deck_id: deck['_id']}).fetch();