How to post data to firestore avoiding non-existent documents?

Question

I have a data structure similar to this that I want to post to firestore database via REST API:

I manually created the House1 document, then Floor1 and Ground.

Ground contains the data:

REST API in R

Now, I am trying to use the firestore REST API in R to create the same thing.

library(httr)
library(jsonlite)

# POST function
post_data_to_firestore <- function(path, data, auth_token) {
  r <- httr::POST(
    url = sprintf("https://firestore.googleapis.com/v1beta1/%s", path),
    config = httr::add_headers(
      "Content-Type" = "application/json",
      "Authorization" = paste("Bearer", auth_token)
    ),
    body = data
  )
  return(r)
}

PROJECT_NAME <- "firebase-project"
COLLECTION <- "Block"
accessTokenu <- "access-token"

endpoint <- paste0("projects/", PROJECT_NAME, "/databases/(default)/documents/", COLLECTION)

data_list <- toJSON(
    list(
    fields = list(
      Name = list("stringValue" = "Ground")
    )
  ), auto_unbox = TRUE
)

post_data_to_firestore(
  path = paste0(endpoint, "/House2/Floor1", "?documentId=", "Ground"),
  data = data_list,
  auth_token = accessTokenu
)

This creates House2 which is a non-existent document according to firestore. I understand that all I have created here is only Ground that contains Name:

Question

How do I change my POST request to ensure that I properly create documents so that I can query them?

Answer 1

When you manually added House1 using the Firebase Console, you would have clicked the "Add Document" button for House1, then you clicked "Start Collection" for Floor1, then you clicked "Add Document" for Ground and again for Top.

So manually (via Firebase Console) you created 3 documents:

• Block/House1
• Block/House1/Floor1/Ground
• Block/House1/Floor1/Top

But your REST API is creating a single document:

• Block/House2/Floor1/Ground

Answer 2

You'll need to perform a separate POST call for each document in this nested structure. There is no single API call that creates a deeply nested child and all parent documents.

Answer 3

I don't think you need to change post_data_to_firestore. You just need to call it once for each individual document you want to create. Firestore will not automatically create documents in the middle of a path. It will just create the one document for the one path you provide in the request. It works the same way for the client libraries that wrap the underlying protocol.