CODEWITHSUNDEEP
firebasenosqlgoogle-cloud-firestore
NeXtMaN_786
NeXtMaN_786

Reputation: 681

Best way to structure related data in firebase/firestore and manage updates?

If I have User and Profile objects. What is the best way to structure my collections in firestore given that the follow scenarios can take place?

  1. Users have a single Profile
  2. Users can update their Profile
  3. Users can save other users' profiles
  4. Users can deleted their saved profiles
  5. The same profile can't be saved twice

If Users and Profiles are separate collections, what is the best way to store saved profiles?

One way that came to mind was that each user has a sub collection called SavedProfiles. The id of each document is the id of the profile. Each saved Profile only contains a reference to the user who's profile it belongs to.

The other option was to do the same thing but store the whole profile of each saved profile.

The benefits of the first approach is that when a user updates their own profile there's no need to update any of the their profiles that have already been saved as it's only the reference that is stored. However, attempting to read a user's saved profiles may require two read operations (which will be quite often), one to get all the references then querying for all the profiles with those reference (if that's even possible???). This seems quite expensive.

The second approach seems like the right way to go as it solves the problem of reading all the saved profiles. But updating multiple saved profiles seems like an issue as each user's saved profiles may be unique. I understand that it's possible to do a batch update but will it be necessary to query each user in the db for their saved profiles and check if that updated profile exists, if so update it? I'm not too sure which way to go. I'm not super used to NoSQL data structures and it already seems like I've done something wrong since I've used a sub collection since it's advised to keep everything as denormalized as possible so please let me know if the structure to my whole db is wrong too, which is also quite possible...

Please provide some examples of how to get and update profiles/saved profiles.

Thank you.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1231

Answers (1)

Jason Berryman
Jason Berryman

Reputation: 4908

Welcome to the conundrum that is designing a NoSQL database. There is no right or wrong answer, here. It's whatever works best for you.

As you have identified, querying will be much easier with your second option. You can easily create a Cloud Function which updates any profiles which have been modified.

Your first option will require multiple gets to the database. It really depends how you plan to scale this and how quick you want your app to run.

Option 1 will be a slow user experience, while all of the data is fetched. Option 2 will be a much faster user experience, but will requre your Cloud Function to update every saved profile. However, this is a background task so wouldn't matter if it takes a few seconds.

Upvotes: 2

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