CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptangularperformancegoogle-cloud-firestoreangularfire
Just a guy
Just a guy

Reputation: 5912

Should updates to Firstore items in AngularFire be done through the AngularFirestoreCollection?

In my app, I have a list that requires an "or" condition. But, as the docs say:

In this case, you should create a separate query for each OR condition and merge the query results in your app.

As a result, in my service, I'm managing two queries and surfacing them as a single observable list to consumers.

The problem comes in with updating. I have the choice of doing extra work to match up the item needing update to the correct collection so I can do the following:

myCollection.doc(item.id).update(item);

or I can make this much more simple and just:

angularFirestore.doc(`path/to/${item.id}`).update(item);

I'm operating under the assumption that the first method will result in faster updates as I'm using the same reference that it would optimistically update instantly. And that the latter will be slower in that it would be more round about by updating the persistence layer and then the collection referencing getting notified about later (probably still a small time).

All of the above is assumption, however. I back this just with a few random instances where I've seen it take a second or two for an update or delete to show up in an other part of the view, but I haven't been able to actually inspect the process.

Does anyone know if the above is correct? Should I be doing the extra work to write through the collection references or does angularfire(and/or firestore) handle this and make them effectively the same operation under the hood?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 86

Answers (1)

Frank van Puffelen
Frank van Puffelen

Reputation: 598728

AngularFire2 is a thin wrapper around RxFire, which itself is a relatively thin wrapper around the Firebase JavaScript SDK.

There should be no significant performance difference between updating a document through AngularFire or updating it directly through the JavaScript SDK. In both cases the majority of the time is spent in the JavaScript SDK, and on the wire between the client and server. For this reason I typically update directly through the JavaScript SDK, since it's often a bit more direct and the AngularFire abstraction has little advantage for me in write operations. Given that AngularFire is built on top of this SDK, it picks up the changes instantly even when they're not made through AngularFire.

If you have an instance where this does not seem to be the case, I recommend creating a question with the minimal, complete/standalone code that reproduces that problem.

Upvotes: 1

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