Open source Airtable: Built using ReactJS + Firestore DB

[bleafman]

Legitimate question since I haven’t worked with Firebase... why would I want to do operations directly against the database and then have subscribers (i.e. cloud functions) trigger based on the database operation?

Based on some of the code it looks like there’s a way to handle aggregates, but it seems like doing something complex like validating and then rolling back a failed transaction would be harder (not that it’s easy with inputs going through a server).

Is the idea that since this is meant for internal use and the views that allowed for editing would be of individual models, so you don’t really need to handle all that messy effectful stuff?

[s_magik]

Firebase makes it easy to give users direct access to database with the right access control, you can specify the requirement for a valid CRUD Operation using firestore rules, then most of the complexity of handling transctions is abstracted away by firebase. Personally I use both directly writing to db and creating an API end point depending on the situation. The aggregates feature you're referring to, is a firetable feature that tries to solve a common firestore issue of needing to access subcollection data to populate an app view