What Is The Use Case Of Reference Type In Firestore Document And How To Use It Specially In An Android App?

In my Android app, if I get the document path by getting the value of reference type field of a document then how am I going to call it? Because the reference path I'm going to get

Solution 1:

If you are storing the following document reference in the database:

/Users/OctUsers/1stWeekUsers/OlCvJFfWZeAlcttdlgzz/

And you want to get this:

FirebaseFirestore.getInstance().collection(collectionPath).document(documentPath).collection(collectionPath).document(documentPath)

You can symply rewrite it like this:

FirebaseFirestore.getInstance().document("/Users/OctUsers/1stWeekUsers/OlCvJFfWZeAlcttdlgzz/");

Remember, the most important part in a DocumenetReference object is the string path. If you want to get that String representation, use DocumentReference's getPath() method for that.

Furthermore, if you need to deserialize that path String back into a DocumentReference object, simply use FirebaseFirestore.getInstance().document(path).

Solution 2:

When you query for a document contains a reference type field, the field will show up in a DocumentSnapshot on an Android client as a DocumentReference type object. You can treat this just like any other DocumentReference that you build on your own. You can call get() on it to get the referred document a you would normally. You don't have to do anything to parse the path to the document (unless you want to).