Two years late but I just began reading the Firestore documentation recently cover to cover for fun and found withConverter which I saw wasn't posted in any of the above answers. Thus:
If you want to include ids and also use withConverter (Firestore's version of ORMs, like ActiveRecord for Ruby on Rails, Entity Framework for .NET, etc), then this might be useful for you:
Somewhere in your project, you probably have your Event model properly defined. For example, something like:
Your model (in TypeScript):
./models/Event.js
export class Event {
constructor (
public id: string,
public title: string,
public datetime: Date
)
}
export const eventConverter = {
toFirestore: function (event: Event) {
return {
// id: event.id, // Note! Not in ".data()" of the model!
title: event.title,
datetime: event.datetime
}
},
fromFirestore: function (snapshot: any, options: any) {
const data = snapshot.data(options)
const id = snapshot.id
return new Event(id, data.title, data.datetime)
}
}
And then your client-side TypeScript code:
import { eventConverter } from './models/Event.js'
...
async function loadEvents () {
const qs = await firebase.firestore().collection('events')
.orderBy('datetime').limit(3) // Remember to limit return sizes!
.withConverter(eventConverter).get()
const events = qs.docs.map((doc: any) => doc.data())
...
}
Two interesting quirks of Firestore to notice (or at least, I thought were interesting):
Your event.id is actually stored "one-level-up" in snapshot.id and not snapshot.data().
If you're using TypeScript, the TS linter (or whatever it's called) sadly isn't smart enough to understand:
const events = qs.docs.map((doc: Event) => doc.data())
even though right above it you explicitly stated:
.withConverter(eventConverter)
Which is why it needs to be doc: any.
(But! You will actually get Array<Event> back! (Not Array<Map> back.) That's the entire point of withConverter... That way if you have any object methods (not shown here in this example), you can immediately use them.)
It makes sense to me but I guess I've gotten so greedy/spoiled that I just kinda expect my VS Code, ESLint, and the TS Watcher to literally do everything for me. Oh well.
Formal docs (about withConverter and more) here: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/query-data/get-data#custom_objects