firecms/website/docs/collections/collections.md

id, title, sidebar_label

id	title	sidebar_label
collections	Collections	Collections

In FireCMS, collections represent groups of entities. Collections need to be associated with an entity schema. You can find collections at the top level of the navigation tree (the entries displayed in the home page and the navigation drawer), or as subcollections

Once you have defined at least one entity schema, you can include it in a collection.

You can find collection views as the first level of navigation in the main menu, or as subcollections inside other collections, following the Firestore data schema.

Check the full API reference in Entity collections

• name The plural name of the view. E.g. 'products'.

• path Relative Firestore path of this view to its parent. If this view is in the root the path, it is equal to the absolute one. This path also determines the URL in FireCMS.

• subcollections Following the Firestore document and collection schema, you can add subcollections to your entity in the same way you define the root collections.

• defaultSize Default size of the rendered collection.

• group Optional field used to group top level navigation entries under a navigation view. If you set this value in a subcollection, it has no effect.

• description Optional description of this view. You can use Markdown.

• properties Properties displayed in this collection. If this prop is not set, every property is displayed.

• excludedProperties Properties that should not get displayed in the collection view. All the other properties from the entity are displayed. It has no effect if the properties value is set.

• filterCombinations If you need to filter/sort by multiple properties in this collection, you can define the supported filter combinations here. In the case of Firestore, you need to create special indexes in the console to support filtering/sorting by more than one property. You can then specify here the indexes created.

• initialFilter Initial filters applied to this collection.

• initialSort Default sort applied to this collection. It takes tuples in the shape ["property_name", "asc"] or ["property_name", "desc"]

• extraActions Builder for rendering additional components such as buttons in the collection toolbar. The builder takes an object with props entityCollection and selectedEntities if any are set by the end user.

• pagination If enabled, content is loaded in batches. If false all entities in the collection are loaded. You can specify a number to specify the pagination size (50 by default) Defaults to true

• additionalColumns You can add additional columns to the collection view by implementing an additional column delegate.

• textSearchEnabled Flag to indicate if a search bar should be displayed on top of the collection table.

• permissions You can specify an object with boolean permissions with the shape {edit:boolean; create:boolean; delete:boolean} to indicate the actions the user can perform. You can also pass a PermissionsBuilder to customize the permissions based on user or entity.

• inlineEditing Can the elements in this collection be edited inline in the collection view. If this flag is set to false but permissions.edit is true , entities can still be edited in the side panel.

• exportable Should the data in this collection view include an export button. You can also set an ExportConfig configuration object to customize the export and add additional values. Defaults to true

:::note In the examples you might see references to the type Product (which defines the model) or the schema productSchema, as declared in the entity schemas section :::

Sample collection

import { buildCollection } from "dist/index";

const productsCollection = buildCollection<Product>({
    path: "products",
    schema: productSchema,
    name: "Products",
    group: "Main",
    description: "List of the products currently sold in our shop",
    textSearchEnabled: true,
    // additionalColumns: [productAdditionalColumn], // Example below
    filterCombinations: [{ price: "desc", available: "desc" }],
    permissions: ({ user, authController }) => ({
        edit: true,
        create: true,
        delete: false
    }),
    excludedProperties: ["related_products"]
});

Additional columns

If you would like to include a column that does not map directly to a property, you can use the additionalColumns field, providing a AdditionalColumnDelegate, which includes an id, a title, and a builder that receives the corresponding entity.

In the builder you can return any React Component.

:::important If your additional column depends on the value of another property of the entity you can define the dependencies prop as an array of property keys so that the data is always updated. This will trigger a rerender whenever there is a change in any of the specified property values. :::

Example

import {
    buildSchema,
    buildCollection,
    AdditionalColumnDelegate
} from "@camberi/firecms";

type User = { name:string}

export const fullNameAdditionalColumn: AdditionalColumnDelegate<User> = {
        id: "full_name",
        title: "Full Name",
        builder: ({ entity }) => {
            let values = entity.values;
            return typeof values.name === "string" ? values.name.toUpperCase() : "No name provided";
        },
        dependencies: ["name"]
    };

const usersCollection = buildCollection<User>({
    path: "users",
    schema: buildSchema<User>({
        name: "User",
        properties: {
            name: { dataType: "string", title: "Name" }
        }
    }),
    name: "Users",
    additionalColumns: [
        fullNameAdditionalColumn
    ]
});

Advanced example

import {
  buildCollection,
  AdditionalColumnDelegate,
  AsyncPreviewComponent
} from "@camberi/firecms";

export const productAdditionalColumn: AdditionalColumnDelegate<Product> = {
  id: "spanish_title",
  title: "Spanish title",
  builder: ({ entity, context }) =>
          <AsyncPreviewComponent builder={
            context.dataSource.fetchEntity({
              path: entity.path,
              entityId: entity.id,
              schema: localeSchema
            }).then((entity) => entity.values.name)
          }/>
};

:::tip AsyncPreviewComponent is a utility component provided by FireCMS that allows you to render the result of an async computation (such as fetching data from a subcollection, like in this case). It will display a skeleton loading indicator in the meantime. :::

Subcollections

Subcollections are collections of entities that are found under another entity. For example, you can have a collection named "translations" under the entity "Article". You just need to use the same format as for defining your collection using the field subcollections.

Subcollections are easily accessible from the side view while editing an entity.

Filters

Filtering is enabled by default for string, numbers, booleans, timestamps and arrays. A dropdown is included in every column of the collection where applicable.

Since Firestore has limited querying capabilities, each time to apply a filter or new sort, the previous sort/filter combination gets reset by default (unless filtering, sorting by the same property).

If you need to enable filtering/sorting by more than one property at a time, you can specify the filters that you have enabled in your Firestore configuration. In order to do so, just pass the indexes configuration to your collection:

import { buildCollection } from "@camberi/firecms";

const productsCollection = buildCollection<Product>({
    path: "products",
    schema: productSchema,
    name: "Products",
    indexes: [
        {
            price: "asc",
            available: "desc"
        }
    ]
});