How to list subcollections in a Cloud Firestore document

15
votes

Say I have this minimal database stored in Cloud Firestore. How could I retrieve the names of subCollection1 and subCollection2?

rootCollection {
    aDocument: {
        someField: { value: 1 },
        anotherField: { value: 2 }
        subCollection1: ...,
        subCollection2: ...,
    }
}

I would expect to be able to just read the ids off of aDocument, but only the fields show up when I get() the document.

rootRef.doc('aDocument').get()
  .then(doc =>

    // only logs [ "someField", "anotherField" ], no collections
    console.log( Object.keys(doc.data()) )
  )
3
javascriptfirebasegoogle-cloud-firestore
Aren't collections supposed to be known to the programmer beforehand? What is your use case? - Victor Nascimento
@VictorNascimento. The use case is dealing with the lack of recursive deletion. I'm trying to delete a document with subcollections in it, and those subcollections should be deleted too because they are children of the document and no longer valid. Yes, at the moment I happen to know the names of the collections, but it would be terrible practice to need to enumerate by hand every single subcollection on a tree of potentially infinite depth just to delete a single document. - skylize
Sub-collections are not members/properties of the parent document that is used to reference them. - TheAddonDepot
Recursive deletion can be done in the Admin SDK and via the CLI. See doc here. - Kato

3 Answers

5
votes

In Node.js you'll be after the 'ListCollectionIds' method

var firestore = require('firestore.v1beta1');

var client = firestore.v1beta1({
  // optional auth parameters.
});

// Iterate over all elements.
var formattedParent = client.anyPathPath("[PROJECT]", "[DATABASE]", "[DOCUMENT]", "[ANY_PATH]");

client.listCollectionIds({parent: formattedParent}).then(function(responses) {
    var resources = responses[0];
    for (var i = 0; i < resources.length; ++i) {
        // doThingsWith(resources[i])
    }
})
.catch(function(err) {
    console.error(err);
});

This is not currently supported in the client SDKs (Web, iOS, Android).

5
votes

It seems like they have added a method called getCollections() to Node.js:

firestore.doc(`/myCollection/myDocument`).getCollections().then(collections => {
  for (let collection of collections) {
    console.log(`Found collection with id: ${collection.id}`);
  }
});

This example prints out all subcollections of the document at /myCollection/myDocument

0
votes

Isn't this detailed in the documentation?

/**
 * Delete a collection, in batches of batchSize. Note that this does
 * not recursively delete subcollections of documents in the collection
 */
function deleteCollection(db, collectionRef, batchSize) {
    var query = collectionRef.orderBy('__name__').limit(batchSize);

    return new Promise(function(resolve, reject) {
        deleteQueryBatch(db, query, batchSize, resolve, reject);
    });
}

function deleteQueryBatch(db, query, batchSize, resolve, reject) {
    query.get()
        .then((snapshot) => {
            // When there are no documents left, we are done
            if (snapshot.size == 0) {
                return 0;
            }

            // Delete documents in a batch
            var batch = db.batch();
            snapshot.docs.forEach(function(doc) {
                batch.delete(doc.ref);
            });

            return batch.commit().then(function() {
                return snapshot.size;
            });
        }).then(function(numDeleted) {
            if (numDeleted <= batchSize) {
                resolve();
                return;
            }

            // Recurse on the next process tick, to avoid
            // exploding the stack.
            process.nextTick(function() {
                deleteQueryBatch(db, query, batchSize, resolve, reject);
            });
        })
        .catch(reject);
}