Firestore is an indexed database. For each field in a document, that document is inserted into that field's index as appropriate based on your configuration. If a document doesn't contain a particular field (like challenge_id) it will not appear in that field's index and will be omitted from queries on that field. Importantly, because of the way Firestore is designed, queries must be able to read an index, in one continuous sweep which prevents using not-equals (!=, <>) queries and exclusive ranges (v<2 || v>4) in a single query as these would require jumping sections of the index.
Field values are sorted according to the Realtime Database sort order except that the results can be sorted by multiple fields when duplicates are encountered instead of just the document's ID.
Firestore Value Sort Order
|Priority|Sorted Values|Priority|Sorted Values|
|-|-|-|-|
|1|null|6|strings|
|2|false|7|DocumentReference|
|3|true|8|GeoPoint|
|4|numbers|9|arrays|
|5|Timestamp|10|maps|
Inequality !=/<>
To perform an inequality query on Firestore, you must rework your query so that it can be read by reading from Firestore's indexes. For an inequality, this is done by using two queries - one for values less than the equality and another for values greater than the equality.
As a trivial example, let's say I wanted the numbers that aren't equal to 3.
const someNumbersThatAreNotThree = someNumbers.filter(n => n !== 3)
can be written as
const someNumbersThatAreNotThree = [
...someNumbers.filter(n => n < 3),
...someNumbers.filter(n => n > 3)
];
Applying this to Firestore, you can convert this incorrect query:
const docsWithChallengeID = await colRef
.where('challenge_id', '!=', '')
.get()
.then(querySnapshot => querySnapshot.docs);
into these two queries and merge their results:
const docsWithChallengeID = await Promise.all([
colRef
.orderBy('challenge_id')
.endBefore('')
.get()
.then(querySnapshot => querySnapshot.docs),
colRef
.orderBy('challenge_id')
.startAfter('')
.get()
.then(querySnapshot => querySnapshot.docs),
]).then(results => results.flat());
Important Note: The requesting user must be able to read all the documents that would match the queries to not get a permissions error.
Missing/Undefined Fields
Simply put, in Firestore, if a field doesn't appear in a document, that document won't appear in that field's index. This is in contrast to the Realtime Database where omitted fields had a value of null.
Because of the nature of NoSQL databases where the schema you are working with might change leaving your older documents with missing fields, you might need a solution to "patch your database". To do this, you would iterate over your collection and add the new field to the documents where it is missing.
To avoid permissions errors, it is best to make these adjustments using the Admin SDK with a service account, but you can do this using a regular SDK using a user with the appropriate read/write access to your database.
This function is recursive, and is intended to be executed once.
async function addDefaultValueForField(queryRef, fieldName, defaultFieldValue, pageSize = 100) {
let checkedCount = 0, pageCount = 1;
const initFieldPromises = [], newData = { [fieldName]: defaultFieldValue };
// get first page of results
console.log(`Fetching page ${pageCount}...`);
let querySnapshot = await queryRef
.limit(pageSize)
.get();
// while page has data, parse documents
while (!querySnapshot.empty) {
// for fetching the next page
let lastSnapshot = undefined;
// for each document in this page, add the field as needed
querySnapshot.forEach(doc => {
if (doc.get(fieldName) === undefined) {
const addFieldPromise = doc.ref.update(newData)
.then(
() => ({ success: true, ref: doc.ref }),
(error) => ({ success: false, ref: doc.ref, error }) // trap errors for later analysis
);
initFieldPromises.push(addFieldPromise);
}
lastSnapshot = doc;
});
checkedCount += querySnapshot.size;
pageCount++;
// fetch next page of results
console.log(`Fetching page ${pageCount}... (${checkedCount} documents checked so far, ${initFieldPromises.length} need initialization)`);
querySnapshot = await queryRef
.limit(pageSize)
.startAfter(lastSnapshot)
.get();
}
console.log(`Finished searching documents. Waiting for writes to complete...`);
// wait for all writes to resolve
const initFieldResults = await Promise.all(initFieldPromises);
console.log(`Finished`);
// count & sort results
let initializedCount = 0, errored = [];
initFieldResults.forEach((res) => {
if (res.success) {
initializedCount++;
} else {
errored.push(res);
}
});
const results = {
attemptedCount: initFieldResults.length,
checkedCount,
errored,
erroredCount: errored.length,
initializedCount
};
console.log([
`From ${results.checkedCount} documents, ${results.attemptedCount} needed the "${fieldName}" field added.`,
results.attemptedCount == 0
? ""
: ` ${results.initializedCount} were successfully updated and ${results.erroredCount} failed.`
].join(""));
const errorCountByCode = errored.reduce((counters, result) => {
const code = result.error.code || "unknown";
counters[code] = (counters[code] || 0) + 1;
return counters;
}, {});
console.log("Errors by reported code:", errorCountByCode);
return results;
}
You would then apply changes using:
const goalsQuery = firebase.firestore()
.collection("user_goals");
addDefaultValueForField(goalsQuery, "challenge_id", "")
.catch((err) => console.error("failed to patch collection with new default value", err));
The above function could also be tweaked to allow the default value to be calculated based on the document's other fields:
let getUpdateData;
if (typeof defaultFieldValue === "function") {
getUpdateData = (doc) => ({ [fieldName]: defaultFieldValue(doc) });
} else {
const updateData = { [fieldName]: defaultFieldValue };
getUpdateData = () => updateData;
}
/* ... later ... */
const addFieldPromise = doc.ref.update(getUpdateData(doc))
