Let's say I have a collection of cars and I want to filter them by price range and by year range. I know that Firestore has strict limitations due performance reasons, so something like:
db.collection("products")
.where('price','>=', 70000)
.where('price','<=', 90000)
.where('year','>=', 2015)
.where('year','<=', 2018)
will throw an error:
Invalid query. All where filters with an inequality (<, <=, >, or >=) must be on the same field.
So is there any other way to perform this kind of query without local data managing? Maybe some kind of indexing or tricky data organization?
The error message and documentation are quite explicit on this: a Firestore query can only perform range filtering on a single field. Since you're trying to filter ranges on both price and year, that is not possible in a single Firestore query.
There are two common ways around this:
Perform filtering on one field in the query, and on the other field in your client-side code.
Combine the values of the two range into a single field in some way that allows your use-case with a single field. This is incredibly non-trivial, and the only successful example of such a combination that I know of is using geohashes to filter on latitude and longitude.
Given the difference in effort between these two, I'd recommend picking the first option.
A third option is to model your data differently, as to make it easier to implement your use-case. The most direct implementation of this would be to put all products from 2015-2018 into a single collection. Then you could query that collection with db.collection("products-2015-2018").where('price','>=', 70000).where('price','<=', 90000).
A more general alternative would be to store the products in a collection for each year, and then perform 4 queries to get the results you're looking for: one of each collection products-2015, products-2016, products-2017, and products-2018.
I recommend reading the document on compound queries and their limitations, and watching the video on Cloud Firestore queries.
You can't do multiple range queries as there are limitations mentioned here, but with a little cost to the UI, you can still achieve by indexing the year like this.
db.collection("products")
.where('price','>=', 70000)
.where('price','<=', 90000)
.where('yearCategory','IN', ['new', 'old'])
Of course, new and old go out of date, so you can group the years into yearCategory like yr-2014-2017, yr-2017-2020 so on. The in can only take 10 elements per query so this may give you an idea of how wide of a range to index the years.
You can write to yearCategory during insert or, if you have a large range such as a number of likes, then you'd want another process that polls these data and updates the category.
In Flutter You can do something like this,
final _queryList = await db.collection("products").where('price','>=', 70000).get();
final _docL1 = _querList.where('price','<=', 90000);
Add more queries as you want, but for firestore, you can only request a limited number of queries, and get the data. After that you can filter out according to your need.
Related
Let's say I have a collection of cars and I want to filter them by price range and by year range. I know that Firestore has strict limitations due performance reasons, so something like:
db.collection("products")
.where('price','>=', 70000)
.where('price','<=', 90000)
.where('year','>=', 2015)
.where('year','<=', 2018)
will throw an error:
Invalid query. All where filters with an inequality (<, <=, >, or >=) must be on the same field.
So is there any other way to perform this kind of query without local data managing? Maybe some kind of indexing or tricky data organization?
The error message and documentation are quite explicit on this: a Firestore query can only perform range filtering on a single field. Since you're trying to filter ranges on both price and year, that is not possible in a single Firestore query.
There are two common ways around this:
Perform filtering on one field in the query, and on the other field in your client-side code.
Combine the values of the two range into a single field in some way that allows your use-case with a single field. This is incredibly non-trivial, and the only successful example of such a combination that I know of is using geohashes to filter on latitude and longitude.
Given the difference in effort between these two, I'd recommend picking the first option.
A third option is to model your data differently, as to make it easier to implement your use-case. The most direct implementation of this would be to put all products from 2015-2018 into a single collection. Then you could query that collection with db.collection("products-2015-2018").where('price','>=', 70000).where('price','<=', 90000).
A more general alternative would be to store the products in a collection for each year, and then perform 4 queries to get the results you're looking for: one of each collection products-2015, products-2016, products-2017, and products-2018.
I recommend reading the document on compound queries and their limitations, and watching the video on Cloud Firestore queries.
You can't do multiple range queries as there are limitations mentioned here, but with a little cost to the UI, you can still achieve by indexing the year like this.
db.collection("products")
.where('price','>=', 70000)
.where('price','<=', 90000)
.where('yearCategory','IN', ['new', 'old'])
Of course, new and old go out of date, so you can group the years into yearCategory like yr-2014-2017, yr-2017-2020 so on. The in can only take 10 elements per query so this may give you an idea of how wide of a range to index the years.
You can write to yearCategory during insert or, if you have a large range such as a number of likes, then you'd want another process that polls these data and updates the category.
In Flutter You can do something like this,
final _queryList = await db.collection("products").where('price','>=', 70000).get();
final _docL1 = _querList.where('price','<=', 90000);
Add more queries as you want, but for firestore, you can only request a limited number of queries, and get the data. After that you can filter out according to your need.
I am working on small app the allows users to browse items based on various filters they select in the view.
After looking though, the firebase documentation I realised that the sort of compound query that I'm trying to create is not possible since Firestore only supports a single "IN" operator per query. To get around this the docs says to use multiple separate queries and then merge the results on the client side.
https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/query-data/queries#query_limitations
Cloud Firestore provides limited support for logical OR queries. The in, and array-contains-any operators support a logical OR of up to 10 equality (==) or array-contains conditions on a single field. For other cases, create a separate query for each OR condition and merge the query results in your app.
I can see how this would work normally but what if I only wanted to show the user ten results per page. How would I implement pagination into this since I don't want to be sending lots of results back to the user each time?
My first thought would be to paginate each separate query and then merge them but then if I'm only getting a small sample back from the db I'm not sure how I would compare and merge them with the other queries on the client side.
Any help would be much appreciated since I'm hoping I don't have to move away from firestore and start over in an SQL db.
Say you want to show 10 results on a page. You will need to get 10 results for each of the subqueries, and then merge the results client-side. You will be overreading quite a bit of data, but that's unfortunately unavoidable in such an implementation.
The (preferred) alternative is usually to find a data model that allows you to implement the use-case with a single query. It is impossible to say generically how to do that, but it typically involves adding a field for the OR condition.
Say you want to get all results where either "fieldA" is "Red" or "fieldB" is "Blue". By adding a field "fieldA_is_Red_or_fieldB_is_Blue", you could then perform a single query on that field. This may seem horribly contrived in this example, but in many use-cases it is more reasonable and may be a good way to implement your OR use-case with a single query.
You could just create a complex where
Take a look at the where property in https://www.npmjs.com/package/firebase-firestore-helper
Disclaimer: I am the creator of this library. It helps to manipulate objects in Firebase Firestore (and adds Cache)
Enjoy!
I have documents with a startDate and endDate. I would like to query between the range of the startDate and endDate. I can query between a range for one date like so:
whereField("startDate", isGreaterThan: start).whereField("startDate, isLessThan: end)
But I cannot query two fields like so:
whereField("startDate", isGreaterThan: start).whereField("endDate", isLessThan: end)
Firestore throughs an exception when using more than one field in a compound where statement.
No matter what is the platform that you are using for building your application, I'm sure that the error that you get is quite explicit. Cloud Firestore official documentation is also quite explicit regarding this topic. So there are some query limitations, when it comes to Firestore:
Cloud Firestore does not support the following types of queries:
Logical OR queries. In this case, you should create a separate query for each OR condition and merge the query results in your app.
So a Firestore query can perform a range filtering only on a single property. Since you are trying to filter ranges on two properties, you're geeting that error message and this is the expected behaviour since this is not possible in a single Firestore query.
To solve this, you can choose from one of the following solutions:
You can perform filtering on one (first) field in the query and on the other (second) field client-side, as also the official documentation indicates.
You can combine the values of the two range into a single field in some way that allows your use-case with a single field. A very successful example of such a combination would be the use of geohashes for filtering on latitude and longitude properties as Frank van Puffelen explained very well in this video, Querying Firebase and Firestore.
Another option is to change the way your are storing your data and model it differently. The most simple implementation would be to put all items within the startDate and endDate into a single collection. Since you didn't choose a tag for a platform, I will write the necessary query in Javascript but it can be simply written also for other programming languages. So you can query that collection with the following query:
db.collection("startDate-endDate").where('date','>=', start).where('date','<=', end);
Another even more general alternative would be to store all your items in a collection for each periode you need (year, monts or days) separately, and then perform the necessary number of queries to get the items you are looking for one of each collection, itemsFromFirstYear, itemsFromSecondYear and so on.
Please take also take a look at the official documentation regarding:
document on compound queries and their limitations
video on Cloud Firestore queries.
IMHO, I'd recommend picking up the first option.
I have documents with a startDate and endDate. I would like to query between the range of the startDate and endDate. I can query between a range for one date like so:
whereField("startDate", isGreaterThan: start).whereField("startDate, isLessThan: end)
But I cannot query two fields like so:
whereField("startDate", isGreaterThan: start).whereField("endDate", isLessThan: end)
Firestore throughs an exception when using more than one field in a compound where statement.
No matter what is the platform that you are using for building your application, I'm sure that the error that you get is quite explicit. Cloud Firestore official documentation is also quite explicit regarding this topic. So there are some query limitations, when it comes to Firestore:
Cloud Firestore does not support the following types of queries:
Logical OR queries. In this case, you should create a separate query for each OR condition and merge the query results in your app.
So a Firestore query can perform a range filtering only on a single property. Since you are trying to filter ranges on two properties, you're geeting that error message and this is the expected behaviour since this is not possible in a single Firestore query.
To solve this, you can choose from one of the following solutions:
You can perform filtering on one (first) field in the query and on the other (second) field client-side, as also the official documentation indicates.
You can combine the values of the two range into a single field in some way that allows your use-case with a single field. A very successful example of such a combination would be the use of geohashes for filtering on latitude and longitude properties as Frank van Puffelen explained very well in this video, Querying Firebase and Firestore.
Another option is to change the way your are storing your data and model it differently. The most simple implementation would be to put all items within the startDate and endDate into a single collection. Since you didn't choose a tag for a platform, I will write the necessary query in Javascript but it can be simply written also for other programming languages. So you can query that collection with the following query:
db.collection("startDate-endDate").where('date','>=', start).where('date','<=', end);
Another even more general alternative would be to store all your items in a collection for each periode you need (year, monts or days) separately, and then perform the necessary number of queries to get the items you are looking for one of each collection, itemsFromFirstYear, itemsFromSecondYear and so on.
Please take also take a look at the official documentation regarding:
document on compound queries and their limitations
video on Cloud Firestore queries.
IMHO, I'd recommend picking up the first option.
I have a Firebase (NoSQL) collection of say 5,000 "players". Each day I want to query a subset of those players in order to perform some operation. My question is, what is the best way to do that?
As best as I can tell, there is no way to perform such a query within Firebase directly. So for example, I cannot say "Collection of 5,000 players, give me all of the players which match ANY of these identifiers". If that is an option, please advise.
One option I thought of would be to create a new collection each day with the identifiers of players I am interested in performing operations on. Would this be the preferred method in Firebase? IE, I'd create a collection like 20190105Game and it would contain the identifier subset. I'd query that collection first, then go to the Players collection to get collection.where("identifier", "==", "other_identifier")
Is there a better way?
If you want to filter a subset of the players, you have two options:
Include the condition for the subset into your query. E.g. playersRef.where("subset", "=", 2).where("othercondition", "=", "value").orderBy("somefield").limit(2)
Create a (sub)collection for the subset of players.
Neither is pertinently better than the other, it all depends on your exact use-cases. I'd typically go for the first option, unless I have a use-case where tht is impossible due to my other query or throughput requirements.