Tracking your Firebase hosting bandwidth, & Firestore reference fields #AskFirebase
Why Stack Overflow recommends it
Stack Overflow users link it when explaining that Firestore Reference fields offer little over plain string paths beyond console UI benefits.
Recommended by 3 people across 5 different months, 2019 to 2021.
What it is
An episode of Google's #AskFirebase series where Jen Person and Abe Haskins answer viewer questions. The second half (from about 4:34) explains what Firestore reference fields are for and how they behave compared with storing a path as a string; the first half covers tracking Firebase Hosting bandwidth with Stackdriver.
What people said
Recommends Renaud Tarnec · 2019-01 · Stack Overflow · on “Firestore references create a "TypeError: Converting circular structure to JSON"”
To answer to your second question about storing References: actually, at the time of writing this answer , there is no real advantage of storing References (i.e. path elements) as Reference [LINK] type instead of storing them as String. Please watch this official video from Firebase [this video] which contains detailed explanations (starting at 4:34).
Recommends Renaud Tarnec · 2019-08 · Stack Overflow · on “How to get document with reference fields populated”
@NodirNasirov "what is the point of having reference then?" -> You might be interesting by watching this episode of #AskFirebase (starting at 272 seconds): [this video]
Recommends Renaud Tarnec · 2020-03 · Stack Overflow · on “Firebase storage add file reference to firestore”
@LanFeusT "what is the Reference type in the console for". The Reference type is indeed a "strange beast"... you will find more details in this #AskFirebase video: [this video]
Recommends DIGI Byte · 2021-05 · Stack Overflow · on “Firebase array of references”
In firestore, a Reference object is constructed into a document or collection reference and you can invoke any of the document methods on it as needed. const ref = snapshot.data().reviews[0]; ref.get(); ref.remove(); The error in particular is saying that the item is not a string, which if it is a firestore reference, is an object and thus, not compatible. A great video to watch: [this video]
Recommends Ahmad Khan · 2021-11 · Stack Overflow · on “Cloud Firestore: Write document reference from Flutter Plugin/SDK”
Yeah, you can add a document reference in a document but it is not preferred in the development environment. You may use this on the Firestore console only. This episode [this video] from #AskFirebase might help you understand it properly.
Cites Renaud Tarnec · 2019-03 · Stack Overflow · on “Hot to build Firebase Chat Room database?”
At the time of writing, using a string or a Reference will not make a big difference from a developer perspective. According to this official Firebase video, at the time of writing , the Reference data type mainly "provides value in the Firebase console UI". You may watch the video starting at 4:37 for more detailed information: [this video] With both of these data types (Text string and Reference) you can "point" to a document and read the corresponding data, mimicking a primary key-foreign key relationship in SQL. For example, as explained in the documentation ( [LINK] ) you can create a DocumentReference [LINK] from a slash-separated path, like firebase.firestore().doc('/User/user_1') using th
Cites buryo · 2020-02 · Stack Overflow · on “Querying by a field with type 'reference' in Firestore”
At the moment, using `reference` as type is almost useless. Only thing it adds to you is that you don't make mistakes like referencing a document that doesn't exist. They have talked about this on their Google Channel: [this video]
Cites Lluís Muñoz · 2021-07 · Stack Overflow · on “Reference last document in a Firestore Collection”
Having a field referencing the last field of a collection, and automatically updating that reference so it always points to the last field, is not possible in Firestore. I would recommend just making a query to get the last document reference whenever you need it. But if you want to do it, as a workaround, you can update the field yourself, and there are a couple of ways to do it: Updating it from your code every time you add a new field to the collection you want to reference with an update query. Creating a Cloud Function using the onCreate or onWrite triggers to update the reference field each time changes are made to the collection. Please note that this approach, although the most relia