Document-collection data model in Firebase - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Building a Simple Firestore Document-Collection Structure

📖 Scenario: You are creating a small app to store information about books in a library. Each book has a title, author, and year published. You will use Firestore's document-collection model to organize this data.

🎯 Goal: Build a Firestore structure with a collection called books. Each document in books will represent one book with fields for title, author, and year.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a collection named books.

Add three book documents with exact fields and values.

Use a variable libraryRef to reference the books collection.

Write code to add a new book document to the books collection.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Firestore's document-collection model is used in many apps to store structured data like user profiles, product catalogs, or blog posts.

💼 Career

Understanding how to organize data in Firestore is essential for frontend and backend developers working with Firebase to build scalable, real-time applications.

1

Create the books collection with initial book documents

Create a Firestore collection reference called books and add three documents with these exact fields and values:
{ title: 'The Great Gatsby', author: 'F. Scott Fitzgerald', year: 1925 },
{ title: '1984', author: 'George Orwell', year: 1949 },
{ title: 'To Kill a Mockingbird', author: 'Harper Lee', year: 1960 }.

Firebase

// Initialize Firestore and create the books collection reference
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use collection(db, 'books') to create the collection reference. Use addDoc to add each book document.

2

Create a variable libraryRef to reference the books collection

Create a new constant called libraryRef and assign it the value of the books collection reference.

Firebase

import { initializeApp } from 'firebase/app';
import { getFirestore, collection, addDoc } from 'firebase/firestore';

const firebaseConfig = {
  // Your Firebase config here
};

const app = initializeApp(firebaseConfig);
const db = getFirestore(app);

const books = collection(db, 'books');

const libraryRef = null; // Create libraryRef here

await addDoc(books, { title: 'The Great Gatsby', author: 'F. Scott Fitzgerald', year: 1925 });
await addDoc(books, { title: '1984', author: 'George Orwell', year: 1949 });
await addDoc(books, { title: 'To Kill a Mockingbird', author: 'Harper Lee', year: 1960 });

Need a hint?

Assign libraryRef the value of books.

3

Add a new book document using libraryRef

Use await addDoc with libraryRef to add a new book document with these exact fields:
{ title: 'Brave New World', author: 'Aldous Huxley', year: 1932 }.

Firebase

import { initializeApp } from 'firebase/app';
import { getFirestore, collection, addDoc } from 'firebase/firestore';

const firebaseConfig = {
  // Your Firebase config here
};

const app = initializeApp(firebaseConfig);
const db = getFirestore(app);

const books = collection(db, 'books');
const libraryRef = books;

await addDoc(books, { title: 'The Great Gatsby', author: 'F. Scott Fitzgerald', year: 1925 });
await addDoc(books, { title: '1984', author: 'George Orwell', year: 1949 });
await addDoc(books, { title: 'To Kill a Mockingbird', author: 'Harper Lee', year: 1960 });

// Add new book document here

Need a hint?

Use await addDoc(libraryRef, { ... }) to add the new book.

4

Complete the Firestore setup with proper async function wrapper

Wrap all Firestore calls inside an async function called setupLibrary and call it at the end of the code.

Firebase

import { initializeApp } from 'firebase/app';
import { getFirestore, collection, addDoc } from 'firebase/firestore';

const firebaseConfig = {
  // Your Firebase config here
};

const app = initializeApp(firebaseConfig);
const db = getFirestore(app);

// Wrap Firestore calls in async function
async function setupLibrary() {
  // Your code here
}

// Call the async function
setupLibrary();

Need a hint?

Define an async function setupLibrary that contains all Firestore calls, then call it.