Why do firebase collections seem to begin with a null row?

Question

I\'ve created a simple firebase data set to test some REST calls with (see the im

Answer 1

Firebase automatically detects when an object 'looks like' an array, and converts it accordingly. Since 'systems' and 'system_types' have children of 1, 2, and 3, Firebase is automatically converting these to arrays at output time. However, since you didn't specify a value for index 0, Firebase is just inserting an empty element.

I'd suggest either using zero-based ID's, or perhaps starting your id's with something non-numeric so we know it's not an array (ie: item1, item2, item3).

You could also just ignore the null element -- In Firebase null and non-existent are the same thing.