Firebase search by child value

Question

I have the following structure on my Firebase database:

I would like to search for an user by name, last name or email but as I don't have the user key in the level above I don't know how I can achieve this. I'm doing and administrator session so it wouldn't have access to the user key.

I have tried:

let usersRef = firebase.database().ref('users');
usersRef.orderByValue().on("value", function(snapshot) {
    console.log(snapshot.val());
    snapshot.forEach(function(data) {
        console.log(data.key);
    });
});

But it brings all the users on the database. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can use equalTo() to find any child by value. In your case by name:

ref.child('users').orderByChild('name').equalTo('John Doe').on("value", function(snapshot) {
    console.log(snapshot.val());
    snapshot.forEach(function(data) {
        console.log(data.key);
    });
});

The purpose of orderByChild() is to define the field you want to filter/search for. equalTo() can get an string, int and boolean value.

Also can be used with auto generated keys (pushKey) too.

You can find all the documentation here