Why adminRefs?

[jeffreydavis83]

Hi Chaoming Li, thanks for this amazing starter template. I am new to web dev so this has been much of help.

I just wanted to ask that why do we need "adminRefs" in our database? Like we already have the "admin" array to check if user has the permissions.

[chaoming]

The adminRefs and userRefs are for reading the user documents under the users collection.

[jeffreydavis83]

Makes sense. Thanks!

[jeffreydavis83]

Sorry I am gonna ask another noob question,

What if we don’t use the adminRefs and userRefs and instead fetch from the database using id only? I am just curious how adminRefs and userRefs are benefiting us?

[chaoming]

No worries.

There are two approaches to not use adminRefs and userRefs.

1. After reading the user IDs from access or admins array, loop through the users collection one by one based on the list of IDs. I think this is definitely not a very efficient way to retrieve data because each ID will need an API call to the users collection to retrieve the user document.

2. After reading the user IDs from access or admins array, execute a query to retrieve all the user documents from the users collection that match the IDs in the array. However, I can't find examples to query a collection based on a list of IDs in the document https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/query-data/queries, so I designed the system to use array of reference to resolve it. This is possible based on .where(admin.firestore.FieldPath.documentId(), 'in', ['id1', 'id2']) fails: '... FieldPath.documentId() must be a string or a DocumentReference' googleapis/nodejs-firestore#990, but I am not sure about the performance compared to the current method.

Cheers,

[jeffreydavis83]

Thanks man! I just have this one doubt,

The cloud function getAccountUsers includes:

 let getUsers = [];
            accountRef.data().accessRefs.forEach(user => {
                getUsers.push(getDoc('users/'+user.id));
            });
            return Promise.all(getUsers);

Aren’t you executing getDoc for each user? Wouldn’t each user then will require an API call in this case?

[chaoming]

True, looks like it's OK to remove adminRefs and accessRefs and simply to use admins and access to simplify the data structure. Thanks for the question.

[chaoming]

This issue is resolved in commit dd1286c

[jeffreydavis83]

Thanks!