Android RxFirebase

RxJava wrapper for use with the Android Firebase client

Installation

dependencies {

compile "io.ashdavies.rx:rx-firebase:{
latest-version
}
" 
}

Description

A lightweight RxJava2 wrapper for the Android Firebase client SDK, the user is expected to own the lifecycle of an asynchronous request via RxJava2 Disposable handling, however elements in this library will properly unregister listeners when a Publisher is cancelled, except in the case of value setting where it is only possible to register a listener when making the request. In this case the emitter is checked for it's subscription state.

Whilst the FirebaseDatabase api is mirrored with RxFirebaseDatabase it only really uses the database reference, this is so that the reference hierarchy can easily be traversed through child and parent elements. Methods requiring FirebaseDatabase obtain this from the DatabaseReference and allow you to chain further requests by returning itself.

This library depends on RxTasks and RxJava2 to provide appropriate api responses. Therefore asynchronous responses will return, Single, Completable and Flowable respectively.

Usage

Many of the operations can be referenced in further detail in the official documentation.

An instance of either RxFirebaseAuth or RxFirebaseDatabase can be retrieved using their respective getInstance method, which will then use the default Firebase element. Alternatively this can also be provided as a parameter should you wish to use a custom one.

RxFirebaseAuth

RxFirebaseAuth has a fairly mirrored api to that of FirebaseAuth and can in most cases be used as a drop in replacement. Methods which have no return value will return the instance so that methods can be chained.

Calls to getCurrentUser() will return a Maybe emitting the user only if the user is logged in otherwise it will just call onComplete immediately.

RxFirebaseDatabase

RxFirebaseDatabase has a simple interface which also mimics that of its Firebase counterpart, at this time it is not worthwhile to facilitate all the features available via the Query interface therefore it is possible to use a Query object with RxFirebaseDatabase.with(query).

The main responsibility of RxFirebaseDatabase is to be able to consume child and value events using reactive extensions, such as retrieving values, setting and removing values.

One of the main observations here is the consumption of child events, this is achieved through the use of the ChildEvent object which has reference to the event type, and data snapshot which can then be used to resolve the data value.

Sample

To run the example application, copy your own google-services.json from Firebase into the sample directory. An example database and read-only rule set are in sample-database.json and sample-rules.json. Anonymous Authentication will also need to be enabled.