CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptfirebasefirebase-authentication
Chen
Chen

Reputation: 970

Firebase Auth Built-in identity

I am building a web platform to connect learners with tutors using Firebase Auth and Firestore. I am storing the learners' user info in a Firestore collection, and the tutor's info in another. I am building a function that can detect if a client is a learner or a tutor upon login.

One solution I was thinking is to query in which collection the user is found using UID. Although, this is a potential solution. But it sounds like it requires a lot of transaction, and may have a long run time if collections get big. Is there something else I can do for that? I am wondering if I can use authentication to build an embedded identity to each user to differentiate between "Tutor" and "Learner"? So each time the user logs in, we know the identity immediately?

I know that in the decoded authentication token, there is info such as this:

{ iss: 'https://securetoken.google.com/xxxx',
aud: 'xxxx',
auth_time: 1569886929,
user_id: 'aB03',
sub: 'aB03',
iat: 1570582588,
exp: 1570586188,
email: '[email protected]',
email_verified: false,
firebase:
{ identities: { email: [Array] }, sign_in_provider: 'password' },
uid: 'aa3' }

Can I leverage one of these to build what I want?

Really appreciate your time and help.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 42

Answers (1)

Frank van Puffelen
Frank van Puffelen

Reputation: 598817

Since you mention "collection", I assume you're looking to use Firestore. In that case: the size of the collection has no effect on the query performance. No matter if there are 1,000 user documents in the collection, 1,000,000 or even 1,000,000,000, the time it takes to query for a single user document will always be the same.

Aside from that you can also store the user's type in the ID token (which is what you've shown in your question). This is known as a "custom claim", since you're adding a custom property for your app to the information. You'll want to do this from a trusted environment (your development machine, a server you control, or Cloud Functions), as I'd assume users should not be able to change their own role. See the documentation on controlling access with custom claims for more information on this.

Upvotes: 1

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