Firestore Search - LIKE - firebase

I want to search the "displayName" in documents nested within a collection, or more specifically the data is as follows:
users -> $idstring -> displayName
Ive come up with the following using AngularFire but its still not quite working for me.. I need to check displayName against the first 3 chars of val (user entered) and bring back results that start with that, I need a kind of LIKE search operation to occur, is this possible with firestore.. so far its just returning almost everything in my users collection
this.itemsCollection = this.aft.collection<iUser>('users', ref => ref.orderBy("displayName").startAt(val))

As mentioned on the Cloud Firestore Documentation:
Cloud Firestore doesn't support native indexing or search for text
fields in documents. Additionally, downloading an entire collection to
search for fields client-side isn't practical.
And to enable full text search of your data, you'd need to use a third-party search service like Algolia or ElasticSearch.
The documentation actually provides a guide on how to integrate Algolia with Firebase.

Related

How to list all non existent documents in a collection?

Say I have the following structure:
collectionA/documentA/collectionB/documentB
But I have set documentB directly to the above path (without explicitly creating collectionA, documentA or collectionB), so the document "documentA" is a non existent document that does not show in queries if I list all documents of collectionA even with admin sdk.
However the firebase web console somehow manages to list such documents. Not only that, I have also seen a third party app Firefoo list such documents and somehow even paginate the results. How can I achieve this?
Turns out this can be achieved with the
Firestore REST API v1
using the listDocuments endpoint and setting query param showMissing to true.
All Firestore queries are based on having some data about that document present in the index that is used for the query. There is no public API to show non-existing documents.
The Firebase console shows these documents based on getting a list of all collections, and then building a data model from that.

how to wrap my head around a FireStore query

I am new in Flutter - Firestore
I am learning flutter with firebase and creating a sample dating app
I have a list of users that I get in a stream and display it using List view
Firestore.instance.collection('users').snapshots()
I have learnt to filter this like so
.where((user) => user.age < settings.agemax && user.age > settings.agemin))
and all this works.
I also have a subcollection called shortlist (list of users that current user has shortlisted) that I get using,
Firestore.instance.collection('users').document(uid).collection('shortlist').snapshots()
Now I am trying to redefine my first query GetUsers with filters based on following
How do I exclude shortlisted users that I am fetching in a stream from all users stream
Similarly would also need to filter out "matched users" and "Blocked / declined" users as well !
I believe my question is how do I query Users Collection and exclude records with uid's that contained in a Shortlist subcollection. I am planning to use the same logic for matches and blocked !? am I on the right track ?
also ... do I need to refetch all records when a users shortlists/matches/blocks someone, as the stream would change or is there a way to remove that one record from the listview without rebuilding, may be I should separate this question in two.
If I understand correctly you are looking for the (just introduced) not-in operator, so I recommend also checking out this blog post.
I expect that this operator hasn't landed in the Flutter libraries yet, as that may take some time. I recommend checking the upcoming releases to see when it lands, or checking/filing an issue on the repo.
Until then, there's no way to exclude results from a query, so you will have to exclude the items from the stream of results in your application code.

Flutter Profile Matching App - Cloud Firestore Data Modeling | How to Query to avoid unnecessary reads for already swiped UID´s

I tried my best with the search function and not really getting the results I´m searching for.
At the moment I try to replicate a functionality for swiping profiles on a card stack. The profiles are loaded over a Firebase Firestore backend. The problem is, due to the geoFireStore query, I get with every load within a specific radius a whole bunch of documents and I would like to reduce the read amount directly in the query.
So what I'm trying to achieve is, that when I swiped a profile once (left or right) I never want to read it in the query again. In addition, to save reads, I don't want to do this client sided, it should be done in the query directly.
Firestore JSON structure at the moment:
Users (collection)
UIDs [documents]
name
active
match {map}
If the match map doesn't contain the own UID (if exist is null) then read in query, else when own UID exist in other user profile under the map match (boolean: true or false for liked or disliked) then don't show as query result.
My stream is built this way:
return geo
.collection(
collectionRef:
friendrCollection.where("active", isEqualTo: true).where("match.$uid", isNull: true))
.within(
center: geoFirePoint,
radius: suchRadius,
field: 'position',
strictMode: false)
.map(_friendrsGPSListFromSnapshot);
}
I am working on this for 3 weeks now and not getting the results I want :D
-Should I stay with firestore or better the real-time-database?
-How do I need to structure the data to get a "except" query working?
Right now it is like:
Collection: Users --> Documents: UIDs --> Match{ownUID}
Thanks in advance
Andreas :)
I still not managed to find a proper solution to reduce the number of unnecessary profile reads inside the firestore query.
Has anyone an idea to handle this part?
The only way I found was to lookup existing matches on the client side (extra firestore collection), but that means that I always have to load the whole bundle of profiles and throwing them away afterward :(
Thank you!
Andreas

Get by DOC_ID only with Firestore REST API

I'm using Firebase REST API to get documents. Now the following url works fine:
https://firestore.googleapis.com/v1beta1/projects/{project}/databases/(default)/documents/{collection}/{doc_id}
However I'd like to know if it's possible to get a document only with {doc_id} without specifying the collection?
Thanks so much!
With the Firestore REST API, you will not be able to query the database for all documents with a specific ID under all possible collections. This will not be possible with the other SDKs as well.
What you could do with the REST API is listing all the (sub-)collections of a given document, see https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/reference/rest/v1beta1/projects.databases.documents/listCollectionIds?authuser=0. You will receive collectionIds array of Collections IDs and you will be able to iterate on this array to search for all the documents with a specific ID within those collections.
Note that it doesn't seem to be possible to list the top-level collections for the database.

Firestore: Get documents without parent document

I'm using Firebase Cloud Firestore and can't figure out how to access documents without knowing the specific path. The database structure is users/{user id}/favourites/{favourite id}. There are no fields in users/{user id} only subcollections. Knowing the user id, i can get the favourites for the user, but I can't get a list of users to get everyone's favourites. Here is the code I am trying (Java admin SDK):
db.collection("users").get().get()
which results in an empty Iterable with no DocumentSnapshots.
How can I get a list of the most popular favourites?
EDIT: I've discovered I can get a list of users with no fields if I add a field. Even if I delete it later, it still appears as a document in the collection.
EDIT2: I've discovered that I can create an empty document, so I'm just doing that for now. As a one-off, I can get a list of all users from firebase auth and look up which ones have a favourites collection and just set those to empty documents.

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