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

As with many questions, the answer is - It depends.

You should be very careful when handling large amounts of data on the front end. On top of making your front end feel sluggish, Firestore also charges you $0.60 per million reads you make.

---

Small collection (less than 100 documents)

Use with care - Frontend user experience may take a hit

Handling this on the front end should be fine as long as you are not doing too much logic with this returned array.

db.collection('...').get().then(snap => {
   size = snap.size // will return the collection size
});

---

Medium collection (100 to 1000 documents)

Use with care - Firestore read invocations may cost a lot

Handling this on the front end is not feasible as it has too much potential to slow down the users system. We should handle this logic server side and only return the size.

The drawback to this method is you are still invoking firestore reads (equal to the size of your collection), which in the long run may end up costing you more than expected.

Cloud Function:

...
db.collection('...').get().then(snap => {
    res.status(200).send({length: snap.size});
});

Front End:

yourHttpClient.post(yourCloudFunctionUrl).toPromise().then(snap => {
     size = snap.length // will return the collection size
})

---

Large collection (1000+ documents)

Most scalable solution

---

FieldValue.increment()

As of April 2019 Firestore now allows incrementing counters, completely atomically, and without reading the data prior. This ensures we have correct counter values even when updating from multiple sources simultaneously (previously solved using transactions), while also reducing the number of database reads we perform.

---

By listening to any document deletes or creates we can add to or remove from a count field that is sitting in the database.

See the firestore docs - Distributed Counters Or have a look at Data Aggregation by Jeff Delaney. His guides are truly fantastic for anyone using AngularFire but his lessons should carry over to other frameworks as well.

Cloud Function:

export const documentWriteListener = 
    functions.firestore.document('collection/{documentUid}')
    .onWrite((change, context) => {

    if (!change.before.exists) {
        // New document Created : add one to count

        db.doc(docRef).update({numberOfDocs: FieldValue.increment(1)});
    
    } else if (change.before.exists && change.after.exists) {
        // Updating existing document : Do nothing

    } else if (!change.after.exists) {
        // Deleting document : subtract one from count

        db.doc(docRef).update({numberOfDocs: FieldValue.increment(-1)});

    }

return;
});

Now on the frontend you can just query this numberOfDocs field to get the size of the collection.