FirebaseDB provides for sharing between users all running the exact same app on their device. Read “What is FirebaseDB?” to learn more about FirebaseDB and what it does for your applications.
This is a quick and very short app that demonstrates the fundamental operation of FirebaseDB when used in MIT App Inventor. I hope to create a more interesting demo app a bit later.
Caution: FirebaseDB is an experimental component offered by MIT App Inventor. FirebaseDB remains under development and is subject to change; apps written today might not work in the future. Apps containing the FirebaseDB component will not work in the emulator – run on your phone or tablet instead. At this time, the cloud-based database is a shared database, shared among multiple users, and cannot – yet – be linked to your personal Google account.
FirebaseDB is Similar to TinyWebDB
The programming interface for FirebaseDB is nearly the same as that used for TinyWebDB. TinyWebDB is a simple cloud-based database – to use, you need to set up the TinyWebDB on your own server or on Google’s servers. With your data stored in the “cloud”, your data may be shared among many apps. For the FirebaseDB demo, you do not need to set up your own server, nor do you need to use TinyWebDB:
For details on setting up and using TinyWebDB – including some tricks that enable sharing of TinyWebDB data between apps – please see my book,
- App Inventor 2 Databases and Files (Volume 3 e-book)
Step-by-step TinyDB, TinyWebDB, Fusion Tables and Files
Buy from: Amazon, Google Books, Kobo Books
For more information, including a sample chapter, please see my App Inventor books page.
Sample App User Interface
Our simple demonstration app stores and retrieves a text value to and from the FirebaseDB. As with TinyDB or TinyWebDB, enter a “tag” value to use to look up the value. For example, a tag value could be a part number, and the value could be the text description of the part’s name. Or the tag could be a phone number and the value could be the name of the person who has that phone number.
The program is operated by entering a tag and a value and then pressing the Store Value button. The value entered is written to the FirebaseDB database in the cloud.
After a value has been stored, you retrieve values by entering the original tag and pressing Retrieve Value. The data corresponding to the tag is retrieved from FirebaseDB and display in the Value field, on screen.
If the app is run simultaneously on other devices, any data updates made on the other devices result in all devices receiving a data changed notification. When the data in the FirebaseDB is changed, the new data is displayed on all devices.
Designer View
A combination of vertical and horizontal layouts is used to organize the positions of the controls (see the Components list, below, or download the sample code).
Store Value and Retrieve Value are buttons. Tag and Value are labels, followed by text boxes for data entry. Data Changed Event and the status message are both labels.
Drag the FirebaseDB component from the Experimental section of the Designer controls palette. You will receive a warning that FirebaseDB is experimental.
Blocks View
(Sorry for the image quality on these three blocks – the screen capture utility I used for these did not do a very good job)
The btnStoreValue event handler reads the enter tag and data value from the text boxes on screen, and then stores those to the FirebaseDB. Find the FirebaseDB StoreValue component by clicking on the FirebaseDB component in the Blocks list.
Fetching a store value is simple – call FirebaseDB’s GetValue method and pass to it the tag. Unlike TinyDB (but similar to TinyWebDB), the value is not read instantaneously but instead, once the data is read and available, an event called GotValue occurs. A GotValue event handler processed the incoming data; in our simple app, the data is stored back in to the Value text box, on screen.
A unique feature of FirebaseDB is the database’s ability to alert apps that data inside the database has been changed. This alert caused a DataChanged event to occur – and which delivers the tag and value that were updated to the app.
Reminder
FirebaseDB is experimental and incomplete, is subject to change, and should not be relied upon at this time for production code. However, you may use it for learning and experimentation.
Download Source Code
Download: FirebaseDB_Demo.aia
After downloading to your computer, you may upload the file to your App Inventor account using Projects | Import project (.aia) from my computer
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