AngularFire 7 Document Typing

Have we lost document typing with the upgrade to AngularFire 7?

In the past, we were able to do (as shown in the docs) something like afs.doc<Item>('items/1') and that would return DocumentReference<Item> as the type.

Now it looks like the functions that exist are

function doc(firestore: types.FirebaseFirestore, path: string, ...pathSegments: string[]): DocumentReference<DocumentData>;
function doc<T>(reference: types.CollectionReference<T>, path?: string, ...pathSegments: string[]): DocumentReference<T>;
function doc(reference: types.DocumentReference<unknown>, path: string, ...pathSegments: string[]): DocumentReference<DocumentData>;

The only one that is typed is the one that takes in a previous collection reference. Meanwhile, this first is the one we’re directed to use in the upgrade documentation and it only uses DocumentData. One of the big benefits to using AngularFire previously over the vanilla Firebase libraries was the fact that DocumentData didn’t have to be cast. Has that now been removed?

[Methodician]

@jamesdaniels does this mean we will eventually get functionality in line with the current documentation, or that the documentation will be updated to reflect the new (seemingly downgraded) doc and collection type setting?

[jamesdaniels]

It seems Firestore isn’t allowing one to override the typings, only allowing types to be inferred if using a converter. Converters are “better” in the sense that you can have real run-time checks to guard you against data that doesn’t conform to your expectations but they can be overly verbose.

const fooCollection = collection(firestore, 'foo').withConverter({
  toFirestore(data) => ({ ...data }),
  fromFirestore(snapshot) => new Foo(..),
})

return collectionData(fooCollection); //=> Observable<Foo[]>

I’ll address in a future release of Angular/RxFire.