Structuring Relations

Flatten data in your database

The official Firebase docs on 'Best practices for data structure' explicitly advise against nested data.

Instead, Firebase recommends 'flattened' (or 'denormalized') data structures.

This is based off the nested data structure example in the Firebase docs.

{
// This is a poorly nested data architecture, because iterating the children
// of the "chats" node to get a list of conversation titles requires
// potentially downloading hundreds of megabytes of messages
"chats": {
"one": {
"title": "Historical Tech Pioneers",
"messages": {
"m1": { "sender": "ghopper", "message": "Relay malfunction found. Cause: moth." },
"m2": { ... },
// a very long list of messages
}
},
"two": { ... }
}
}

Inbuilt relation helpers

To make this easier, Fireactive provides relations to:

  • encourage best practices in normalized data; and
  • make it easier to fetch related data.

There are relation helpers for both one-to-one and one-to-many relationships.

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