Retrieving a list of entires in Google Firebase's Firestore

Question

Suppose I wanted to use Google Firebase's Firestore as the backend of a simple website showing a list of (journal) entries, and the ability to view an entry, edit an entry, and delete an entry. Fundamentally, I would want to retrieve the list of entry titles, so I could present in my website a table of contents. Then when the visitor clicks one of the titles, the website would navigate to the entry's content.

Now, my question is, how do I get just the titles without the content, of the entries? As far as I have read, this is not possible. I present this problem here to confirm whether I have missed something, or if it is indeed impossible with Firebase to get some of the data from a collection of records, without having to retrieve all of the data.

Answer 1

how do I get just the titles without the content, of the entries?

As you've already found, the client-side SDKs for Firestore always retrieve full documents. The server-side SDKs and REST API have a projection/selection mechanism to retrieve only a subset of the fields, but that ability does not exist in the client-side SDKs.