Control your magic strings in Firebase projects

Firebase's real-time database JavaScript API makes it really easy to wind up with a ton of magic strings in your codebase. Since you access data via "refs" like:

firebase.database.ref(`customers/1`).update({ name: 'Mike' })

In that example, "customers/1" is a magic string that points to some data in the database. Magic strings are well known as something to avoid in software development. And here we are updating a database with one, yikes!

These can easily be managed via patterns. I've been abstracting these into their own modules in an "API-like" pattern. For example:

// api/customers.ts
import { protectedRef } from 'protected-ref'

export const rootRef = 'customers'
export const getCustomerRef = (customerID: string) => protectedRef(rootRef, customerID)
export const updateCustomer = (customerID: string, updateDocument: CustomerUpdateDocument) => getCustomerRef(customerID).update(updateDocument)

And then use it like:

import { updateCustomer } from '../api/customers'

updateCustomer('1', { name: 'Mike' })

Also protected-ref is a firebase package that manifested from this TIL: https://til.hashrocket.com/posts/hyrbwius3s-protect-yourself-against-firebase-database-refs