How to structure friendship data with firebase?

Question

I\'m novice with firebase and I try to structure my data to store friendship between users of my app.

My data are structured like this :

    { users:         


        

Answer 1

You shouldn't store name in the friendships structure, only the usernames. So friendships should look more like this:

{
    friendships: {
        user_1: [
            user_2,
            user_3
        ],
        user_2: [
            user_1
        ]
    }
}

This way if you update name, you only have update it in one place (users). You can cross-reference the username from friendships with the username in users to find name.

Also in case you use push() for friendships, the structure will change a little, but the same principle applies:

{
    friendships: {
        user_1: {
            -KPE008BeSzNR5D3W7t3: user_2,
            -KPE0nF4AW7Lj66xTLUu: user_3
        },
        ...
    }
}