Swift Firestore Search for Users

How can I create a search function for firebase firestore?

After some more creative thinking, I decided to create keywords for each document. It is not super elegant but it works. Also each "name" field is limited to X characters so I do not need to worry about the keywords field exceeding more than 20-30 individual keyword strings.

I added

var keywords: [String]?

to the StoryModel and the fields looks like this once filled in on doc creation:

And I am getting the live results with:

private lazy var storiesDataCollection = Firestore.firestore().collection("Stories")

self.storiesDataCollection
   .whereField("keywords", arrayContains: self.storiesSearchText)
   .limit(to: 8)
   .getDocuments {}

I am not including the function that creates the keywords because I have simply not done it yet, I will edit and add it once I complete it, but for testing I just manually created the keywords in firestore. Lastly, this solution does not ignore case, the search text has to match perfectly.

EDIT: Here is the function that creates the keywords, I also added the ability to make a case matched and lowercased for better searching.

    func createKeywords(name: String) {
        var keywords: [String] = []
        var lowercaseKeywords: [String] = []
        var alreadyKeyed: String = ""
        for letter in name {
            if keywords.isEmpty {
                keywords.append("\(letter)")
                let lower = letter.lowercased()
                lowercaseKeywords.append("\(lower)")
            } else {
                let key = alreadyKeyed + "\(letter)"
                keywords.append(key)
                let lower = key.lowercased()
                lowercaseKeywords.append("\(lower)")
            }
            alreadyKeyed.append("\(letter)")
        }
        let allKeywords = keywords + lowercaseKeywords
        self.storiesDataCollection.document("doc id goes here").updateData([
            "keywords" : allKeywords
        ]) { error in
            if let error = error {
                print("Error: \(error)")
            } else {
                print("SUCCESS")
            }
        }
    }

If you were to feed it a string of "Trevor's NYE Party" here is what it would give back:

["T", "Tr", "Tre", "Trev", "Trevo", "Trevor", "Trevor\'", "Trevor\'s", "Trevor\'s ", "Trevor\'s N", "Trevor\'s NY", "Trevor\'s NYE", "Trevor\'s NYE ", "Trevor\'s NYE P", "Trevor\'s NYE Pa", "Trevor\'s NYE Par", "Trevor\'s NYE Part", "Trevor\'s NYE Party", "t", "tr", "tre", "trev", "trevo", "trevor", "trevor\'", "trevor\'s", "trevor\'s ", "trevor\'s n", "trevor\'s ny", "trevor\'s nye", "trevor\'s nye ", "trevor\'s nye p", "trevor\'s nye pa", "trevor\'s nye par", "trevor\'s nye part", "trevor\'s nye party"]

note the backslashes are not actually uploaded to firestore.

grab the current users first name cloud firebase swift

As you are looping through a list of all user documents so it will show last user's firstName on the label. You might want to show the first user as below,

if let firstUserDoc = snapshot?.documents.first {
   var welcomeName = firstUserDoc["firstname"] as! String
   self.welcomeLabel.text = "Hey, \(welcomeName) welcome!"
}

Or may be this for current user if uid in the list is same as userId,

if let currentUserDoc = snapshot?.documents.first(where: { ($0["uid"] as? String) == userId }) {
   var welcomeName = currentUserDoc["firstname"] as! String
   self.welcomeLabel.text = "Hey, \(welcomeName) welcome!"
}

Query Searches Swift

You'll want to use a Firestore query, instead of performing the search in your application code. With a Firestore query, the filtering is performed by the database, instead of in your application code.

The simplest way to search is:

let dbQuery = COLLECTION_USERS
    .whereField("fullname", isGreaterThanOrEqualTo: query)
    .whereField("fullname", isLessThanOrEqualTo: query+"\u{F7FF}")

This query searches for documents where the fullname starts with the given value.

A few things to note:

• Firestore queries are case-sensitive, so this matches only when the case also matches exactly. You can emulate lower-case queries, by storing the lower-case version of the fullname in a separate file (e.g. fullname_lowercase) and searching on that. For more on this, see Cloud Firestore Case Insensitive Sorting Using Query and Are Cloud Firestore queries still case sensitive?
• This query only searches for documents where the fullname starts with the requested value, not where it contains that value in another place. If you want that, consider using a dedicated search engine.

How can we search through 5,000 users in Firestore db?

Integrate a full text search engine, and keep it in sync with Firestore. Nontrivial to implement. Official docs recommend Algolia: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/solutions/search

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