Firestore: Support for real-time updates

[pauloevpr]

Is there any roadmap to add support for real-time updates?

[jskeet]

I don't know - I believe the expectation is that that's more of a mobile concern, whereas the current API is expected to be used server-side.

[pauloevpr]

Thank you very much for your reply. I get your point, but there are some use cases where real-time support would be extremely useful, even on the server-side. For example, when:

• Integrating with custom server applications (in scenarios where Cloud Functions can't handle the business logic)
• Integrating with web services such as Asp.Net and Asp.Net Core
• Implementing client libraries for platforms which are not currently officially supported by Google, such as Xamarin, WPF, UWP and Windows Forms

Without real-time support, the API seems incomplete, especially because Firestore's RPC documentation does mention support for real-time updates through the Listen function of the service interface.

[jskeet]

I'll pass your comment back to the team - I'm only doing the C# API for it, following the direction given by the main Firestore team.

[pauloevpr]

Thank you very much. I appreciate your help.

[schmidt-sebastian]

Hi, Sebastian here from the Firestore client team. We are currently offering realtime support in the mobile clients for the Web, iOS, Android. We also launched the Node Server SDK with realtime support.

Since we are currently offering Firestore Server SDKs for Node, Go, Python & Java (with C# and others in the works), we first wanted to gauge what the demand for realtime support for these server languages was. Our users have since indicated that they do want to see realtime support in all of these languages, and hence we are treating this as a high priority item on our immediate roadmap. While I can't provide a timeline, expect to see realtime support across all of our SDKs in the not so distant future.

[pauloevpr]

Great news! Thank you very much for your feedback.

[jskeet]

Will leave this issue open as a placeholder to indicate that we're intending to do it. I'll mark it as P2+, but that just means it's not imminent (i.e. working to get it in the next release). It doesn't mean it's not important :)

[Thaina]

Nearly end of the year and still no support for C# while all the admin SDK got update last week

And not even a roadmap was solid

[jskeet]

No support for this specific API call yet, no. We'll get there, but we're doing lots of other work too.

[recyclethis]

From a server side perspective this would be very useful for integrating data collected by mobile devices into line of business systems.

I take it the heavy lifting for this is in the protocol, and there does not exist yet anything in Google.Cloud.Firestore.V1Beta1 to support this? If support is in V1Beta1 it should be fairly trivial to add an onSnapshot method to QuerySnapshot.

[jskeet]

It's far from trivial to provide the kind of support we want to provide. We would rather take time and do it properly than rush a shoddy option. You can use the client property to get the raw gRPC if you want in the meantime. We will attend this feature request over time, but will resist calls to rush.