Provide Native Document Counters and Metadata for Firestore Collections
Problem:Currently, finding the total number of documents inside a Firestore collection requires building custom client-side listeners or cloud functions to maintain manual counter fields. This adds boilerplate code, introduces latency, and risks running into write rate limitations unless complex distributed counters are built.Proposed Solution:Firebase should provide an out-of-the-box, native SDK method (e.g., a simple client-side function) that securely requests the exact document count from the server's index layer without needing to download, fetch, or bill for individual document data payloads.Why this matters:This feature is critical for building cheap, efficient pagination UI, analytics dashboards, and status trackers without incurring massive read costs on large production databases.
Timothy Thompson
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