Firebase Value and ChildAdded (further explanation needed)

Question

I've read the Firebase documentation over and over and again and just need some clarification. This isn't regarding my specific code as much as my understanding of Firebase in general.

I know that .Value retrieves all the data each time its called and continues to monitor the database for changes. And .ChildAdded looks for changes in the children of the reference. Does .ChildAdded also retrieve all of the values initially? Should I be implementing both .Value and .ChildAdded for the same path? If not, when I try just doing .ChildAdded, nothing shows up but when I run .Value, all of my items show up like they are supposed to. What I don't want is for every value to be re-fetched from the database each time a single value is changed or added because that would seemingly cause some bandwidth issues later when I have thousands of items to fetch. Would be best workflow be to create a .Value function (getAllItems()) with ObserveSingleEventOfType so it only calls it once and then have a duplicate function (getNewItems()) except with .ChildAdded and observeEventOfType?

Answer 1

if you have this node

 node:{
   data1:"data",
   data2:{
     subdata1:1,
     subdata2:2
   }
 }

Value with observeEventOfType will be called the first time + every time something inside "node" changes , Value with observeSingleEventOfType will be called only once

Child_Added with observeEventOfType will be called twice ["data1"(it will contain the string "data" and "data2"(it will contain an object with the childs "subdata1" and "subdata2"]

Child_Changed with observeEventOfType will be called every time "data1" or "data2" changed (an event in "data2" will be called every time "subdata1" or "subdata2" change, or if you insert a "subdata3")

This can be used in combination but it depends in each scenario...

FOR THE EVENT TYPE:

usually when you are pointing at a final node like "data1" you use Value and when you are in a node that has a list of similar nodes like "data2" you use a combination of child_added, child_changed and child_removed

FOR THE OBSERVER TYPE:

it's straightforward if you want to get the value at a specific moment; you use the "single event observer". If you want to keep an eye of the value over time you use "event observer"