What is the best way to change a key in firebase?

Question

If I have firebase data something like this:

teams:{
    thunder: {
        wins: 3,
        losses: 2,
        draw: 1
    },
    warrior: {
        wins: 2,
        losses: 4
    }
}

How would I change the "warrior" key to "Warriors"? The only way I can think of is to load the "warrior" data, save it with the new key and then delete the old data. It feels a bit like a hack to me though, is there a better way to do it?

possible duplicate of [Firebase: Update key?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29115990/firebase-update-key) — Frank van Puffelen, Jul 06 '15 at 17:49
Like Mike C said, that's exactly what you need to do, this is the price of the capability of a versatile database schema in document oriented databases. — Gerdinand, Jul 06 '15 at 18:05
@Chrillewoodz edited the question to be more similar to my circumstance. Teams are saved with their name as the key, someone needs to update their team name. — Marty.H, Jul 07 '15 at 00:24
As to the answer below - you can then use https://github.com/gngeorgiev/firesync to greatly simplify this task. — Georgi-it, Jul 07 '15 at 11:57

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 07 '15 at 05:10

Use an array instead and push teams to this array. Then have your structure like this:

teams: [
  {
    name: "thunder",
    wins: 3,
    draws: 2,
    loss: 1
  }
]

Then you can just update the name key directly without having to download the data first in order to update it.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 07 '15 at 18:27

The create a new node and blow out the old one is correct. But going forward a different structure will avoid the issue entirely.

Bottom line with any kind of database programming (for us): never tie keys directly to data. Always use some kind of 'random' or other key structure to reference your data.

Firebase provides a perfect tool for this in childByAutoId, which creates a 'random' child node name key.

Chrillewoodz answer is the answer... and to add some additional clarity

teams
  randomKey_0:
    team_name: "thunder"
    wins: 3
    draws: 2
    loss: 1
 randomKey_1:
    team_name: "warrior"
    wins: 3
    draws: 2
    loss: 1
 randomKey_2:
    team_name: "super dudettes"
    wins: 100
    draws: 0
    loss: 0

The randomKey_x is a firebase generated childByAutoId node name.

With this structure, you can change the team name, wins etc on the fly without altering the structure. And because you now have a reference, you can use it in other nodes to reference back to that team. For example, you could have a separate node to keep info about team members

team_members:
  randomMemberKey_0
     team_member_name: "Scott"
     height: "7.5"
     belongs_to_team: "randomKey_0"
  randomMemberKey_1
     team_member_name: "Billy"
     height: "6.5"
     belongs_to_team: "randomKey_0"
  randomMemberKey_2
     team_member_name: "Frank"
     height: "5.0"
     belongs_to_team: "randomKey_1"

With this structure you can query for information about the team itself or another query to search for any team member or members or information about them.

Thanks, in hindsight I should have done that. But probably not worth changing it now, as the only time it matters is if someone wants to change the name, which will not be a common thing. And on the plus side I have an easier to read data tree. — Marty.H, Jul 08 '15 at 16:43

What is the best way to change a key in firebase?

2 Answers2

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