Is it OK to store objects and objects' ids in separate fields in Firestore

Question

I have collection of chats and I want to search through this collection by chat's members. Collection looks like:

{
 ...
 owner: 'user-123',
 members: ['user-123', 'user-456'].
 membersData: [{
  id: 'user-123',
  name: 'Jack'
 },
 {
  id: 'user-456',
  name: 'Jane'
 }
 ]
 ...
}

The reason of this that I can't search by members' ids using array-contains if members are objects. Is this solution OK? I have a very small experience in firebase (and noSQL databases generally) so may be there are best practices for this type of tasks?

You can search by objects but only using all the data. I think that this [article](https://medium.com/firebase-tips-tricks/how-to-update-an-array-of-objects-in-firestore-cdb611a56073) might help. — Alex Mamo, Apr 28 '22 at 07:55

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 27 '22 at 20:23

Yup, that is completely acceptable an in fact the idiomatic approach if you want to be able to search for just member IDs.

Also see:

Is it OK to store objects and objects' ids in separate fields in Firestore

1 Answers1