Empty arrays are not stored to the backend about angularfire HOT 9 CLOSED

Hi gents,

Firebase doesn't store empty objects or empty arrays. This isn't a problem with angularFire; it's part of the Firebase design. Check out these SO posts for more:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15306191/empty-arrays-dropped-in-post-request-to-firebase

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15408416/how-to-handle-empty-arrays-in-firebase/15414522#15414522

from angularfire.

This is like saying we don't need the number 0 which represents nothing

Silly mistake from Googles side

from angularfire.

Please note that you can always store falsy values for that purpose, as Firebase doesn't care about types: Instead of [], {} or NULL, store either false or 0.

from angularfire.

The root problem here, if I understand it correctly (since I just experienced it) is not that they are not stored on the server, but rather that on the client, the object in $scope could be null or undefined. It wouldn't really matter that it's null on the server (a fundamental of Firebase's behavior that probably won't be changing) but what we do when we retrieve a null.

My thought is that we should probably be creating an empty {} or [] accordingly.

from angularfire.

Okay, so on further investigation, it looks like it's simply not set until angularFire gets a value back. So on null it does nothing. So knowing this, a simple workaround is to manually set the value before hand -- it eliminates the need to check if it exists before pushing or reading.

$scope.items = {}; // temporary workaround
angularFire( path, $scope, 'items', {} );

from angularfire.

This happens for every property down the object. And I'm specifically referring to empty arrays, not objects.

from angularfire.

This should be fixed, we treat NULL values specially now and should reset local data to an empty array or object (they will still be stored as null on Firebase).

Please try with the latest version of angularFire and re-open if you have any trouble!

from angularfire.

@anantn it seems as if empty arrays [] still don't get stored within Firebase as of now.

from angularfire.

@joscha @anantn empty arrays don't get stored in Firebase for me as well.

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