Is there a workaround for the Firebase Query "NOT-IN" Limit to 10?

Question

I saw a similar question here: Is there a workaround for the Firebase Query "IN" Limit to 10?

The point now is, with the query in, the union works, but with the query not-in it will be intersection and give me all the documents, anyone knows how to do this?

Answer 1

As @samthecodingman mentioned, it's hard to provide specific advice without examples / code, but I've had to deal with this a few times and there are a few generalized strategies you can take:

Restructure your data - There's no limit on the number of equality operators you can use You can use up to 100 equality operators, so one possible approach is to store your filters/tags as a map, for example:

id: 1234567890,
...
filters: {
    filter1: true,
    filter2: true,
    filter3: true,
}

If a doc doesn't have a particular tag, you could simply omit it, or you could set it to false, depending on your use case.

Note, however, that you may need to create composite indexes if you want to combine equality operators with inequality operators (see the docs). If you have too many filters, this will get unwieldy quickly.

Query everything and cache locally - As you mentioned, fetching all the data repeatedly can get expensive. But if it doesn't change too often or it isn't critical to get the changes in real time, you can cache it locally and refresh at some interval (hourly or daily, for example).

Implement Full-Text Search - If neither of the previous options will work for you, you can always implement full-text search using one of the services Firebase recommends like Elastic. These are typically far more efficient for use-cases with a high number of tags/filters, but obviously there's an upfront time cost for setup and potentially an ongoing monetary cost if your usage is higher than the free tiers these services offer.