CODEWITHSUNDEEP
firebasegoogle-cloud-platformgoogle-cloud-firestore
50_Seconds _Of_Coding
50_Seconds _Of_Coding

Reputation: 512

how to maintain read counts of documents in firebase

Firebase Firestore: How to monitor read document count by collection?

So first of something similar like question was already asked almost a year ago so dont mark it duplicate cause I need some suggestions in detail.

So here is the scenario,

lets say I have some collections of database and in future I might need to perform some ML on the DB. According to the documents visit.

That is how many times a specific document is visited and for how much time.

I know the mentioned solution above indirectly suggests to perform a read followed by write operation to the database to append the read count every time I visit the database. But it seems this needs to be done from client side

Now if you see, lets say I have some documents and client is only allowed to read the document and not given with access for writing or updating. In this case either I will have to maintain a separate collection specifically to maintain the count, which is of course from client side or else I will have to expose a specific field in the parent document (actual documents from where I am showing the data to clients) to be write enabled and rest remaining field protected.

But fecthing this data from client side sounds an alarm for lot of things and parameters cause I want to collect this data even if the client is not authenticated.

I saw the documentation of cloud functions and it seems there is not trigger function which works as a watch dog for listening if the document is being fetched.

So I want some suggestions on how can we perform this in GCP by creating own custom trigger or hook in a server.

Just a head start will be so usefull.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 233

Answers (2)

Dharmaraj
Dharmaraj

Reputation: 50930

You cannot keep track of read counts if you are using the Client SDKs. You would have to fetch data from Firestore with some secure env in the middle (Cloud Functions or your own server).

A callable function like this may be useful:

// Returns data for the path passed in data obj
exports.getData = functions.https.onCall(async (data, context) => {
  const snapshot = admin.firestore().doc(data.path).get()
  //Increment the read count
  await admin.firestore().collection("uesrs").doc(context.auth.uid).update({
    reads: admin.firestore.FieldValue.increment(1)
  })
  return snapshot.data()
});

Do note that you are using Firebase Admin SDK in this case which has complete access to all Firebase resources (bypasses all security rules). So you'll need to authorize the user yourself. You can get UID of user calling the function like this: context.auth.uid and then maybe some simple if-else logic will help.

Upvotes: 1

Renaud Tarnec
Renaud Tarnec

Reputation: 83191

One solution would be to use a Cloud Function in order to read or write from/to Firestore instead of directly interacting with Firestore from you front-end (with one of the Client SDKs).

This way you can keep one or more counters of the number of reads as well as calculate and apply specific access rights and everything is done in the back-end, not in the front-end. With a Callable Cloud Function you can get the user ID of authenticated users out of the box.

Note that by going through a Cloud Function you will loose some advantages of the Client SDKs, for example the ability to use a listener for real-time updates or the possibility to declare access rights through standard security rules. The following article covers the advantages and drawbacks of such approach.

Upvotes: 1

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