How to separate initial data load from incremental children with Firebase?

Question

I have an application where new children get added to Firebase every 5 seconds or so. I have thousands of children.

On application load, I\'d like to process the ini

Answer 1

Improved the answer from @jacobawenger to not use a global state variable

var ref = new Firebase('https://.firebaseio.com');

ref.once('value', function(snapshot) {
  // do something here with initial value

  ref.on('child_added', function(snapshot) {
    // do something here with added childs
  });

});