How do I stop Firestore from saving all my data?

Question

I'm using Cloud Firestore with Android Studio. I've noticed that it seems to save every field in a class to the database, not just to ones that have setters/getters. How do I stop this from happening?

For example, let's say I have a class called Box, defined like this:

private class Box {
     private int id;
     private String name, label;

     public Box(){}

     public void setId(int thisId) {id = thisId;}
     public void setName(String thisName) { name = thisName;}

     public int getId() { return id;}
     public String getName { return name;}

     public setup label () { ... }
}

I only have setters and getters for id and name, because they're the ones I want to save to the database. I don't want to save label, because it changes each time. However, it's saving it anyway, with a value of null.

What am I doing wrong? How do I stop it from saving a value for label?

Have you looked at this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47114024/firestore-exclude-data-serialization — tyczj, Jul 18 '18 at 18:25

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 21 '19 at 10:12

2

Didn't work for me. So, I put @Exclude annotation before the getter method of the field I want to exclude from writing to Firestore db, and it worked:

@Exclude
public String getId() {
    return id;
}

And remove @Exclude from the variable declaration, if it is an private modifier

answered Jun 21 '19 at 10:12

ADHAMSHERIFF

41
5

Not working for me, I hope there is no any concern with language, as I used Kotlin. – Hitesh Dhamshaniya Sep 13 '19 at 06:43

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 18 '18 at 18:29

1

You can use map to set the variables you want. Then send that map to firestore.

Map<String, Object> map = new HashMap<String, Object>();
map.put("id", "value");
map.put("name", "value");

firestore.collection("Your_collection_name).document(uid).add(map)...`

then you can add success listener or complete listener.

answered Jul 18 '18 at 18:29

Raj

2,997
2
12
30

Thanks, but I’m trying to avoid using a map as it makes sub-data more awkward to save. – Sharon Jul 18 '18 at 18:47

Alex Mamo · Answer 3 · 2018-07-19T08:06:22.877

There is no way to use default object serialization and also selectively remove properties that don't meet your criteria. Object serialization uses all available object properties all the time, regardless of their values. Unlike in Firebase Realtime database, where non-existing values are not displayed at all, in Cloud Firestore, if you create an object without setting its value, Firestore will assign the value of null.

If you don't want a value to be present in your database at all, you can use @Grimthorr's answer as @tyczj suggested in his comment.

To avoid having null properties in your database, as also @Raj suggested, you should use a Map containing only the properties of the document that you want to store. More important, you should also check each value for null, if you don't want to store null for a field. It is the only in which you can achieve this.

From the official documentation, this is how it should look like in code:

Map<String, Object> city = new HashMap<>();
city.put("name", "Los Angeles");
city.put("state", "CA");
city.put("country", "USA");
db.collection("cities").document("LA").set(city);

If your app is already launched and you have null values in your database, you can create a map and use FieldValue.delete() like this:

Map<String, Object> map = new HashMap<>();
map.put("yourField", FieldValue.delete());
yourRef.update(map);

The fields with null values won't be displayed anymore.

Is there everything alright, can I help you with other informations? — Alex Mamo, Jul 20 '18 at 08:27

How do I stop Firestore from saving all my data?

3 Answers3