Firestore is not instantiated in the window object anymore

[REQUIRED] Environment info

firebase-tools: 11.4.1

Platform: Mac

[REQUIRED] Test case

Start the emulator with Firestore Go into the web console, try to access firestore from it

[REQUIRED] Steps to reproduce

Above

[REQUIRED] Expected behavior

Should be able to access it from the window object in the dev console as usual.

[REQUIRED] Actual behavior

Firestore is not accessible from the console anymore since v11.2ish

[yuchenshi]

@MorenoMdz I’ve discussed this with @christhompsongoogle and a few other colleagues. As much as we’d like to retain this feature, it is technically hard (and near infeasible). While we can still expose the app object or the firestore object, those will be near useless without the free-floating functions like doc(firestore, 'a/b') in modular v9 SDK. Chaining from firestore.collection('....').doc('...') is no longer possible in the new v9 SDK syntax. While I cannot speak for the Firebase Console team, the deprecation of v8 SDK is in place and moving towards the new syntax is inevitable in the long run. Not shipping the whole SDK also allows us to vastly reduce the bundle size (and therefore the download / loading time of Emulator UI, and maybe Console in the future.)

With that being said, we’re open to ideas to reimplement this feature within the new constraints. And who knows, maybe your idea can help us keep this feature in the Console as well. Also, just a friendly reminder that the Emulator UI is an open source project and we welcome PRs and discussions at any time. While we’re closing this issue due to reasons above, the comment thread is still open – it only takes one good PR or suggestion to continue the discussion. “Can we make it available again somehow”? Well, let’s talk about “how” 😃 .

[MorenoMdz]

So this was likely caused by the transition to the modular Javascript SDK in v9. The firebase object is no longer in the global space. See 308a98d

Hmm, before we close this, can we make it available again somehow? It is something very useful to have as the queries we can apply from the UI are very limitaded. Feels like a feature regression losing it, and since it is available in the production Firestore console it feels like a feature mismatch as well.