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Firestore: DocumentReference/CollectionReference are sealed classes

See original GitHub issue

Is there any special reason to make DocumentReference and CollectionReference sealed classes? It seems unreasonable to have such restriction. It makes very difficult to extend the functionalities of the API.

For example, instead of calling db.Collection("users").Document("id").Collection("purchases").Document("id"), I could get rid of the magic strings and call something like db.UsersCollection.UserDocument("id").PurchasesCollection.PurchaseDocument("id"). That would be possible by creating custom collections and documents references by deriving DocumentReference/CollectionReference.

Custom references would provide many useful features, such as:

Declare your entire database structure in code
Retrieve specific references without using magic strings
Create reusable queries/procedures by using extension methods
Improve the overall code readability, maintainability and scalability

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 6 years ago
Comments:5

Top GitHub Comments

1reaction

jskeetcommented, Nov 28, 2017

Great! Closing now.

0reactions

pauloevprcommented, Nov 28, 2017

I think my previous comment did miss your point regarding the aspect of immutability. I apologize for that. Now that you brought reliability up, it seems very reasonable that these two classes are sealed.

My real concern is not regarding these two classes in particular, it is actually about making the API flexible so that the community can help to improve it by developing extension libraries. It seems you are already seriously taking this into consideration when developing the API. That is awesome!

This whole idea of making references more easy to access is not a particular use case of mine. I am actually wanting to develop a tool to help developers to materialize their Firestore database structure into code. The tool would basically auto generate helper classes and methods for references based on the provided database structure.

As far as I concern, this issue is completely resolved. Thank you very much for your time.

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