Firebase android : make username unique

Question

Parse will shut down at the end of the year, so I decided to start using Firebase. I need to implement a register process with 3 fields : email, username, password (Email & username must be unique for my app).

Since, Firebase is not providing an easy way to manage username like Parse, I decided to use only the email/password registration and save some additional data like username. Here is my users data structure :

app : {
    users: {
       "some-user-uid": {
            email: "[email protected]"
            username: "myname"
       }
    }
}

But, what I want to do is to make the username unique and to check it before creating an account. These are my rules :

{
    "rules": {
        ".read": true,
        ".write": true,
        "users": {
            "$uid": {
                ".write": "auth !== null && auth.uid === $uid",
                ".read": "auth !== null && auth.provider === 'password'",
                "username": {".validate": "!root.child('users').child(newData.child('username').val()).exists()"}
            }
        }
   }
}

Thank you very much for your help

Answer 1

Part of the answer is to store an index of usernames, that you check against in your security rules:

app : {
    users: {
       "some-user-uid": {
            email: "[email protected]"
            username: "myname"
       }
    },
    usernames: {
        "myname": "some-user-uid"
    }
}

So the usernames node maps a username to a uid. It essentially reads as "username 'myname' is owned by 'some-user-uid'".

With this data structure, your security rules can check if there is already an entry for a given username:

"users": {
  "$uid": {
    ".write": "auth !== null && auth.uid === $uid",
    ".read": "auth !== null && auth.provider === 'password'",
    "username": {
      ".validate": "
        !root.child('usernames').child(newData.val()).exists() ||
        root.child('usernames').child(newData.val()).val() == $uid"
    }
  }
}

This validates that the username isn't claimed by anyone yet OR it is claimed by the current user.