Use Case Summary
- User A creates a story
- User A shares story with unknown (to the app) User B via email (sent via cloud function)
- User B receives an email about the story
- User B visits app and creates a new account
- User B sees/reads story create by User A
Note: stories can only be seen by whom they been shared with or created by
I'm building a role based access system. I've been looking at the role based access firestore documentation and I'm missing one piece.
Consider a story that can only be read by a user for which that story has been shared. Most examples including the firestore example use the UID
has the key to identify shared users. However, that user may not currently be a user of the firebase app additionally how does a user assign that UID.
Story Data
{
title: "A Great Story",
roles: {
aliceUID: {
hasRole: true,
type: "owner",
},
bobUID: {
hasRole: true,
type: "reader",
}
}
}
Story Query
firebase.firestore().collection('stories').where(`roles.${user.uid}.hasRole`, '==', true)
The second part could potentially be solved by maintaining a separate user collection then you could find the user from their email address, but this doesn't address users that have never logged in.
The user who intends to share a story could add the user with an email address. Then using firebase functions we could send an email to notify the user of the shared story and the user could login to the app and read that story.
If we proceed with this method then you would not have a UID but only an email address as the key.
Story Data
{
title: "A Great Story",
roles: {
alice@yahoo.com: {
hasRole: true,
type: "owner",
},
bob@gmail.com: {
hasRole: true,
type: "reader",
}
}
}
Story Query
firebase.firestore().collection('stories').where(`roles.${user.email}.hasRole`, '==', true)
Updated Firestore Rule - from documentation
function getRole(rsc) {
// Read from the "roles" map in the story document.
return rsc.data.roles[request.auth.uid] || rsc.data.roles[request.auth.token.email];
}
I can not get the email query to work. This SO issue mentions that
Unfortunately dots are not allowed as a map key. So email addresses won't work.
I don't see why this would be a conflict on the rules side. It does make for a likely invalid where clause
e.g.
.where(`roles.${user.email}.hasRole`, '==', true) -> .where(`roles.bob@gmail.com.hasRole`, '==', true)
That looks like invalid JS and unfortunately [
and ]
are invalid characters so we can't do
.where(`roles[${user.email}]hasRole`, '==', true)
The final thing I've seen is using for this Firebase talk is to escape the email address using something like
function encodeAsFirebaseKey(string) {
return string.replace(/\%/g, '%25')
.replace(/\./g, '%2E')
.replace(/\#/g, '%23')
.replace(/\$/g, '%24')
.replace(/\//g, '%2F')
.replace(/\[/g, '%5B')
.replace(/\]/g, '%5D');
};
This appears to fix the query where
clause and it's a valid data structure, but it's not a valid Firestore rule meaning it has no true security enforcement.
Any ideas on how to implement this? Please include valid data structure, firestore rules, and query. I've shown and seen many examples that get two out of the three which are all non-working solutions.
Thanks!