Cloud Firestore collection count

Question

Is it possible to count how many items a collection has using the new Firebase database, Cloud Firestore?

If so, how do I do that?

Answer 1

No, there is no built-in support for aggregation queries right now. However there are a few things you could do.

The first is documented here. You can use transactions or cloud functions to maintain aggregate information:

This example shows how to use a function to keep track of the number of ratings in a subcollection, as well as the average rating.

exports.aggregateRatings = firestore
  .document('restaurants/{restId}/ratings/{ratingId}')
  .onWrite(event => {
    // Get value of the newly added rating
    var ratingVal = event.data.get('rating');

    // Get a reference to the restaurant
    var restRef = db.collection('restaurants').document(event.params.restId);

    // Update aggregations in a transaction
    return db.transaction(transaction => {
      return transaction.get(restRef).then(restDoc => {
        // Compute new number of ratings
        var newNumRatings = restDoc.data('numRatings') + 1;

        // Compute new average rating
        var oldRatingTotal = restDoc.data('avgRating') * restDoc.data('numRatings');
        var newAvgRating = (oldRatingTotal + ratingVal) / newNumRatings;

        // Update restaurant info
        return transaction.update(restRef, {
          avgRating: newAvgRating,
          numRatings: newNumRatings
        });
      });
    });
});

The solution that jbb mentioned is also useful if you only want to count documents infrequently. Make sure to use the select() statement to avoid downloading all of each document (that's a lot of bandwidth when you only need a count). select() is only available in the server SDKs for now so that solution won't work in a mobile app.