CODEWITHSUNDEEP
firebasefirebase-realtime-databasegoogle-cloud-functions
Clark McCauley
Clark McCauley

Reputation: 117

Firebase - Multi Path Updates or Cloud Function Listeners

After watching a fair amount of youtube videos, it seems that Google is advocating for multipath updates when changing data stored in multiple places, however, The more I've messed with cloud functions, it seems like they're and even more viable option as they can just sit in the back and listen for changes to a specific reference and push changes as needed to the other references in real time. Is there a con to going this route? Just curious as to why Google doesn't recommend them for this use case.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 926

Answers (1)

Clark McCauley
Clark McCauley

Reputation: 117

NEWER UPDATE: Literally as I was writing this, I received a response from Google regarding my issues. It's too late to turn our apps direction around at this point but it may be useful for someone else.

If your function doesn't return a value, then the server doesn't know how long to wait before giving up and terminating it. I'd wager a quick guess that this might be why the DB calls aren't getting invoked.

Note that since DatabaseReference.set() returns a promise, you can simply return that if you want.

Also, you may want to add a .catch() and log the output to verify the set() op isn't failing.

~[email protected]

UPDATE: My experience with cloud functions in the last month or so has been sort of a love-hate. A lot of our denormalized data relied on Cloud Functions to keep everything in sync. Unfortunately (and this was a bad idea from the start) we were dealing with transactional/money data and storing that in multiple areas was uncomfortable. When we started having issues with Cloud Functions, i.e. the execution of them on a DB listener was not 100% reliable, we knew that Firebase would not work at least for our transaction data.

Overall the concept is awesome. They work amazingly well when they trigger, but due to some inconsistencies in triggering the functions, they weren't reliable enough for our use case.

We're currently using SQL for our transactional data, and then store user data and other objects that need to be maintained real-time in Firebase. So far that's working pretty well for us.

Upvotes: 1

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