Writing to Firebase

Adding records

Adding new records in Firemodel can be done with both the Record and List classes. Let's start with the Record class:

const newPerson = await Record.add(Person, {
  name: "Howdy Doody",
  age: 15
});

This is short and sweet and is likely the most common way of achieving the goal of adding a new record. Not only will this add the stated properties to Firebase but it will also add lastUpdated and createdAt properties as well as a Firebase created ID.

In a slightly modified example, imagine that you want to add a new Company "ABC Corp" and you've decided that rather that using Firebase's push() method -- which is what happened above -- to auto-create an ID you want to use slugified names for the company's ID. No problem, you can just include the ID property as part of the record like so:

await Record.add(Company, { id: "abc-corp", name: "ABC Corp" });

However sometimes you may find yourself already working with a List in which case it may be better to do the following:

const people = await List.recent(People, 25);
/** do some stuff */
const newPerson: Record<Person> = await people.add({
  name: "Howdy Doody",
  age: 15  
})

Note: all CRUD methods in FireMock are "contextual" and therefore there is no need to state the database path as this is already known

Removing records

Removing records is also achievable through Record and List; and in fact there are two different ways to do it with Record. Let's start with the static initializer method:

const deletedPerson = await Record.remove(Person, "1234");

This approach will first fetch the record from Firebase and add it to the Record class; it will then remove it from Firebase and return a record of what the value had been. Getting the record's old values at time of removal can be quite useful but there is a performance penalty so if you wish to just remove the record and not get back the old value you can do this like so:

await Record.remove(Person, "1234", false);

Alternatively there will be cases where you've already gotten an instantiated Record object and your business logic determines that it should be removed you would do the following:

const person = await Record.get(Person, "1234");
/** do some things */
await person.remove();

Finally, in the case where you have a List of data, you can do the following:

const people = await List.all(Person);
await people.remove("1234");

Updating records

In the Firebase SDK -- as well as abstracted-admin / abstracted-client -- the update() operation is "non destructive":

await ref('people/1234').update({ favoriteColor: "blue" });

That same idea is carried forward to Firemodel. So, for instance, if were to execute:

const person = await Record.get(Person, '1234');
person.update({ favoriteColor: 'blue' });

It would update favoriteColor (and lastUpdated) but not change other properties like "name", "age", etc that also sit at the same path of people/1234.