how to save Location Info in Firebase

Question

I am trying to save location (so latitide and longitude) as one of the keys/fields in Firebase. In their example SFVehicles, they do show how to query once the information is stored but my problem is how do i save in the first place.

In their blog post, GeoFire goes Mobile, they are showing how the data would look like - but how do I get that location field populated?

I am able to save other types of strings to the Firebase though. I just use the code below. Question is What data type should the location field be?

        Firebase ref = new Firebase("https://myfirebaselink.firebaseio.com/");

       //User 
       alan = new User("Alan Turing", 1912);


        alanRef.setValue(obj);

I tried location to be a List<String>, but that did not work -- the location field looked like below:

Edit: On more research, found this blog post by Google but they are also saving as keys latitude1 and longitude. This probably was written before GeoFire` was introduced.

Answer 1

The GeoFire for Java project has a great README, that covers (amongst other) setting location data:

In GeoFire you can set and query locations by string keys. To set a location for a key simply call the setLocation() method. The method is passed a key as a string and the location as a GeoLocation object containing the location's latitude and longitude:

geoFire.setLocation("firebase-hq", new GeoLocation(37.7853889, -122.4056973));

To check if a write was successfully saved on the server, you can add a GeoFire.CompletionListener to the setLocation() call:

geoFire.setLocation("firebase-hq", new GeoLocation(37.7853889, -122.4056973), new GeoFire.CompletionListener() {
    @Override
    public void onComplete(String key, FirebaseError error) {
        if (error != null) {
            System.err.println("There was an error saving the location to GeoFire: " + error);
        } else {
            System.out.println("Location saved on server successfully!");
        }
    }
});

To remove a location and delete it from the database simply pass the location's key to removeLocation:

geoFire.removeLocation("firebase-hq");