FR: Firestore Persistence Support for Expo / React Native

[Yonom]

Operating System

iOS 17.2

Browser Version

React Native

Firebase SDK Version

10.7.1

Firebase SDK Product:

Firestore

Describe your project's tooling

React Native 0.73.2

Describe the problem

On React Native (v0.73.2), enabling persistence for Firestore fails.

@firebase/firestore: Firestore (10.7.1): Error using user provided cache. Falling back to memory cache: FirebaseError: [code=unimplemented]: This platform is either missing IndexedDB or is known to have an incomplete implementation. Offline persistence has been disabled.

Steps and code to reproduce issue

npx create-expo-app
yarn add firestore

import { initializeApp } from "firebase/app";
import { initializeFirestore, persistentLocalCache } from "firebase/firestore";

const firebaseConfig = {
  // config here
};

const app = initializeApp(firebaseConfig);

const firestore = initializeFirestore(app, {
  localCache: persistentLocalCache(),
})

yarn start --ios

[cherylEnkidu]

Hi @Yonom ,

Firestore doesn't support using web SDK as node SDK. Here are some possible workarounds:

1. Use the Native SDK reactive native wrapper for iOS SDK and Android SDK.
2. Use third party library to hack node environment to have indexdb implementation, but please keep in mind the indexdb behaviour might be different in those libraries.

[Yonom]

The native libraries require use_frameworks which is incompatible with React Native (Flipper, New Architecture/Fabric). I use the JS library for that reason.

This library already supports React Native for firebase/auth, I wish the same support would be extended to firebase/firestore

In the meantime, polyfilling indexdb should do, thanks for the hint

[yanodnoralov]

@Yonom can you please share how you will pollyfill for indexdb if you end up doing it? I'm having the same issue trying to get offline persistence for managed expo react native. Considering if i should eject and use react native firebase instead, but it's a big change.

[dconeybe]

FWIW this is how Firestore does it in its tests: https://github.com/firebase/firebase-js-sdk/blob/master/packages/firestore/test/util/node_persistence.ts. Note that this is NOT officially supported.