firebase - Firestore data modelling for travel planner

Question

I'm building an apps that involved travel planning using flutter. this app will help people plan their travel by providing few options for them to choose from either cheapest, fastest, shortest etc.

I'm quite new with firebase and i need some advice with the data structure, I was thinking of having public transportation such as train. this train will have it's own schedule. What is the best way to structure this schedule inside the firestore. so that i could create a view that will display train schedule.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65839265/firestore-data-modelling-for-travel-planner

Answer 1

If it were me, I would want to map out how I intend to interact with the application. I usually draw this out by hand as I find it much quicker than trying to model something electronically. I review other similar apps at the same time and try and identify data that are missing. Start simple and build up the various data points that you want to include.

The main thing to note is that Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL, document-oriented database; there are no tables or rows. You store data in documents, which are organised into collections that contain a set of key-value pairs.

Once you have a basic structure, you can opt for one of the Firestore data structures and test it out:

• Documents
• Multiple collections
• Subcollections within documents

Nested data

A typical use case for this might involve a chat app, and you want to store a user's three most recently visited chat rooms as a nested list in their profile.

Subcollections

You can create collections within documents when you have data that might expand over time; for example, you might create a collection of users or messages within chat room documents.

Root-level collections

You can create collections at the root level to organise distinct data sets for users and another for rooms and messages.