Firestore - Simple full text search solution - reactjs

Question

I know that firestore doesn't support full text search and it giving us solution to use third party services. However I found a simple solution to simple "full text search" and I think this might help others who doesn't want to use third party services as me for such a simple task.
I'm trying to search for company name which is saved in firestore collection under my companyName which can be in any format for example "My Awesome Company". When adding new company with companyName or updating a value in companyName I'm also saving searchName with it which is the same value as company name but in lower case without spaces
searchName: removeSpace(companyName).toLowerCase()
removeSpace is my simple custom function which remove all spaces from a text
export const removeSpace = (string) => {
return string.replace(/\s/g, '');
}
That turns our company name to myawesomecompany which is saved in searchName
Now I've got a firestore function to search for company which indexing through searchName and returning companyName. Minumum search value is a searched value without last character and maximum search value is a searched value with added "zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz" transformed to lower case. That means if you search for My Aw then min value will be mya and max value will be myawzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
exports.handler = ((data) => {
const searchValue = data.value.replace(/\s/g, '').toLowerCase()
const minName = searchValue.substr(0, searchName.length-1)
const maxName = searchValue + "zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz"
let list = []
const newRef = db.collection("user").where("profile.searchName", ">=", minName).where("profile.searchName", "<=", maxName)
return newRef.get()
.then(querySnapshot => {
querySnapshot.forEach(doc => {
list.push({ name: doc.data().profile.companyName})
})
return list
})
})
I didn't have time to fully test it but so far it works without any problems. Please let me know if you spot anything wrong with it. Now the question is
Is "z" character the highest value character in firestore or is there any other more decent way to add into the search value maximum amount without adding "zzzzzzzzzzzzz"?

Answer 1

I like your decision to preprocess the text so that it can be queried, but you could provide for a more flexible search by storing lowercase keywords with the users and searching those. In other words, transform:
"My Awesome Company"
to...
{ my: true, awesome: true, company: true }
...and test against that.
When adding/updating the property:
// save keywords on the user
let keywords = {}
companyName.split(' ').forEach(word => keywords[word.toLowerCase()] = true)
When querying:
let searchKeywords = userInputString.split(' ').map(word => word.toLowerCase())
let collection = db.collection("user")
searchKeywords.forEach(keyword => {
collection = collection.where(`keywords.${keyword}` , '==' , true);
});

Answer 2

With a little modification of previous answer I have made another simple text search. I'm saving keyword to an array instead of saving it in object like this
nameIndex: textIndexToArray(companyName)
where textIndexToArray is my custom function
export const textIndexToArray = (str) => {
const string = str.trim().replace(/ +(?= )/g,'')
let arr = []
for (let i = 0; i < string.trim().length; i++) {
arr.push(string.substr(0,i+1).toLowerCase());
}
return arr
}
which transfer a text into array. For example
"My Company"
will return
[m, my, my , my c, my co, my com, my comp, my compa, my compan, my company]
with nameIndex saved in firestore we can simply query the data thorough nameIndex and return companyName
exports.handler = ((data) => {
const searchValue = data.value.toLowerCase()
let list = []
const newRef = db.collection("user").where("nameIndex", "array-contains", searchValue)
return newRef.get()
.then(querySnapshot => {
querySnapshot.forEach(doc => {
list.push({ name: doc.data().companyName, })
})
return list
})
})