Fire.swift

a singleton class to assist interfacing with the database, Firebase storage bucket, caching files, managing your Auth info and interacting with other Auth users

Example Project: Login Portal

create a personal account / login, logs you into your profile page where you can edit your profile details, upload picture. Everyone has a profile, that's it. Foundation for social media-type apps.

Example Project: Browse

Browse the entire database in a simple UITableView. Firebase sometimes delivers JSON objects as an Array or Dictionary, this handles each case, and includes object type detection.

Example projects require Cocoa Pod and Firebase Install

1. Install Cocoa Pods:
   • in command line navigate to the directory with the .xcodeproj file, type pod install
   • from now on, open the .xcworkspace file
2. Copy in your GoogleService-Info.plist with your Firebase account info. Get it here:

see Firebase Getting Started Documentation sections Add Firebase to your app and Add the SDK

Documentation

Fire.swift covers 3 subjects:

• Database
• User
• Storage

Database

• getData() get data from database
• setData() overwrite data at a certain location in the database
• addData() generate a new key and add data as a child
• doesDataExist() check if data exists at a certain location

Why this is important

Firebase sometimes stores data as Arrays, but an auto-generated firebase key won't check to match the array type:

using this function checks against the database before adding:

func addData(_ object:Any, asChildAt path:String, completionHandler: ...){}

Corrected:

User

Firebase comes with FireAuth with a "user" class, but you can't edit it. Solution: create a "users" entry in database with copies of User data but with more info.

• each user is stored under their user.uid
• can add as many fields as you want (nickname, photo, etc..)

all the references to "user" are to our database's user entries, not the proper FIRAuth entry

• getCurrentUser() get all your profile information
• getUser() get a different user's info
• updateCurrentUserWith() update your profile with new information
• newUser() create a new entry for a user (usually for yourself after 1st login)
• userExists() check if a user exists

Storage

since Firebase Storage doesn't keep track of the files you upload, this maintains a record of the uploaded files in your database

• fileCache:[String:Data] the cache for all incoming files (images/pdfs) from the storage bucket
• imageFromStorageBucket() get an image from Firebase storage (or the cache if it's already there)
• uploadFileAndMakeRecord() upload a file to storage, make a record in our database, a