Firestore DB - documents shown in italics

Question

Can someone explain this to me. I am working with node-firestore-backup-restore-master backup script for Firestore from github. Got it working but it only reads one document of the list of documents I have in a collection. The one it reads is in normal text the remaining are in italics and a message for the ones in italics says they don't exist and wont appear in queries.

They do exists and the associated documents and fields that appear when I query from my IOS app but not from the Node.js backup script.

Any thoughts?? Dave

Answer 1

If you create documents with sub-documents and then delete the top level document from an SDK, the delete is not recursive. So while the top-level document is gone, its sub-documents remain.

The document IDs for these are shown as italicized ids in the UI: these documents do not actually exist, but we show them so that you can navigate to the sub collections.

Since there is no document anymore, the document itself will not show up in query results. If you need to find this document in query results, you'll want to create an empty document as a workaround.

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If you need to get these non-existing documents through the API, the only way to do so is by performing a collection group query on the subcollection and determining the parent documents from there.

Answer 2

This happens in two cases:

1. if you delete documents with subcollections

2. if you create directly something like "/collection/document(1)/collection/document(2)" instead of creating it in two steps:

   • step 1. create: /collection/document(1)
   • step 2. create: /collection/document(1)/collection/document(2)

And look like if you are in any of these cases you can not list "document(1)" which is a quite strange way of working because they don't exist as "documents" (this is way they are marked in 'italic') but they "exist" as references to subcollections.