How to add a Timestamp in Firestore with Android?

Question

I am trying to add a timestamp field in an Android client with Firebase Firestore.

According to the documentation:

Annotation used to mark a Date field to be populated with a server timestamp. If a POJO being written contains null for a @ServerTimestamp-annotated field, it will be replaced with a server-generated timestamp.

But when I try it:

@ServerTimestamp
Date serverTime = null; // I tried both java.util.Date and java.sql.Date

//...

Map<String, Object> msg = new HashMap<>();
// ... more data
msg.put("timestamp", serverTime);

On the Cloud Firestore database this field is always null.

Answer 1

That is not the correct way of how to add the time and date to a Cloud Firestore database. The best practice is to have a model class in which you can add a date field of type Date together with an annotation. This is how your model class should look like:

import java.util.Date;

public class YourModelClass {
    @ServerTimestamp
    private Date date;

    YourModelClass() {}

    public Date getDate() {
        return date;
    }

    public void setDate(Date date) {
        this.date = date;
    }
}

When you create on object of YourModelClass class, there is no need to set the date. Firebase servers will read your date field, as it is a ServerTimestamp (see the annotation), and it will populate that field with the server timestamp accordingly.

Another approach would be to use FieldValue.serverTimestamp() method like this:

Map<String, Object> map = new HashMap<>();
map.put("date", FieldValue.serverTimestamp());
docRef.update(map).addOnCompleteListener(new OnCompleteListener<Void>() {/* ... */}