I want to check if my users input contains a substring that is a document in my firestore database, is this possible in Java? (Android-studio)

Question

In the following code, 'question' is a string variable created by a users voice input. this question is compared with document IDs in my firebase cloud firestore.

public void setAnswer(String question){
        FirebaseFirestore JLdatabase = FirebaseFirestore.getInstance();

        DocumentReference docRef = JLdatabase.collection("Products").document(question);
        docRef.get().addOnCompleteListener(new OnCompleteListener<DocumentSnapshot>() {
            @Override
            public void onComplete(@NonNull Task<DocumentSnapshot> task) {
                if (task.isSuccessful()) {
                    DocumentSnapshot document = task.getResult();
                    if (document.exists()) {
                        textViewAnswer.setText(document.getString("location"));
                    } else {
                        textViewAnswer.setText("I can't help you with this yet");
                    }
                } else {
                    textViewAnswer.setText("Oeps. Something went wrong");
                }
            }
        });

If question is exactly equal to the document ID, it works, but most of the time something slightly different will be said. Now I want to check if there is a word/word combination in the question that's equal to one of my documents ID. Is this possible in Java? I couldn't find something like this on the web.

If there is a better way to solve a problem like this. I would like to here!

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 02 '20 at 07:23

what I would do is :

Create a field name that stores question that follows your document ID
Store the question as an array. (meaning each word is its own array)
Perform a firebase query with the function array-contains
Remember how I told you to store your question as an array (e.g ["How", "are", "you])? Well because firebase do not have the LIKE operation as to SQL
After performing your query, you can get the document ID and pass it into the document reference

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 02 '20 at 08:56

If a question is exactly equal to the document ID, it works

It works because you are pointing to the document that has that exact id.

Now I want to check if there is a word/word combination in the question that's equal to one of my documents ID.

Unfortunately, there is no way you can create a query to search for a substring in the document id. The only option that you have is to create a property of type String that can hold the question and perform a query using one of my solutions that can be found in my answer from the following post:

Search by pattern on Cloud Firestore collection

Thank you, your other post helped my out sir. – Luciano Deben Apr 02 '20 at 12:19 — Luciano Deben, Apr 02 '20 at 12:19

I want to check if my users input contains a substring that is a document in my firestore database, is this possible in Java? (Android-studio)

2 Answers2