Tame your Firebase Realtime Database with MobX

While Firebase's Realtime Database enables you to build almost anything, manipulating realtime data in your app can lead to writing code that is hard to debug, understand and maintain.

Enter MobX and mobx-firebase-database.

MobX is a powerful state management library that works with all front-end frameworks.

MobX-firebase-database allows you to map your Firebase realtime data to MobX observables (box, array or map) with firebase, firebase-admin or react-native-firebase

Using it

mobx-firebase-database exports one function getMobxFire, call it with firebase and your firebase config to get access to your toolbox.

import getMobxFire from "mobx-firebase-database";
import firebase from "firebase/app";
import "firebase/database";

// Don't worry about calling it more than once.
const { toBox, toArray, toMap, getFirebaseRef, destroy } = getMobxFire({
  config,
  firebase
});

• toBox : Turns a firebase ref to an observable box

• toArray : Turns a firebase ref to an observable ordered array of {key,value} objects

• toMap : Turns a firebase ref (with any query you can think of) to an observable map: Map<K,V> where K is the child key name and V is the child value

Now that we have access to this set of primitives to build on. We can easily use them to build UIs.

Using mobx-firebase-database with Vanilla JS

import { observe } from "mobx";
import getMobxFirebase from "mobx-firebase-database";
import firebase from "firebase/app";
import "firebase/database";
import { config } from "../config";

const PATH = `TEST_SANDBOX/posts/1`;
let counter = 0;
const pretty = obj =>
  `<pre>${JSON.stringify(obj, null, 2)}</pre>`;

const { toBox } = getMobxFirebase({
  config,
  firebase
});
const refToPost = firebase.database().ref(PATH);
const { value } = toBox(refToPost);

setInterval(() => {
  counter += 1;
  // Write data fo firebase here
  refToPost.set({
    title: `post title ${counter}`
  });
}, 500);
observe(value, () => {
  // see it update here
  document.getElementById("root").innerHTML = pretty(
    value.get()
  );
});

Using mobx-firebase-database with ReactJS

const App = observer(() => {
  // Render it here
  return <pre>{JSON.stringify(value.get())}</pre>;
});

render(<App />, document.getElementById("root"));

It's that simple :)

Want to know more :

Experiment with VanillaJS code
Experiment with React code
Read the docs

That's it folks !

Have any questions ?
Message me on @rakannimer or leave a comment here !