Firebase Firestore, get the reference document inside another document

Question

I'm using Firebase Cloud Firestore, I want when I'm getting a document with reference field inside to receive the reference field as a document and not as a reference to the document...

I have a collection of users and collection of classes (at school) and each class contains a list of references to users (the students in this class). When I using document.get() (to get the class by its reference) it returns an object that contains a list of DocumentReference (of the users) so I need to call document.get() around 20 more times just to get the users as objects and not as a reference to them.

I want to be able to call document.get() once and it will bring me all the references as documents, like that: database and code

Is there an elegant way to do this?

Answer 1

You can't instruct the Firestore client SDK to automatically follow document references during a fetch of a single document. You have to request each individual document. In other words, there is no "join" operation like you might expect in SQL.

See also: What is firestore Reference data type good for?