Given Firebase is case-sensitive, how to handle user @mentions

[David Notik]

Ok, so Firebase is case-sensitive so if you're users/Kai is not same as users/kai. If I have an @kai it won't find you... I'm not sure best way around it except to force lowercasing of all usernames (at least in the Firebase location, and I can keep the correct case in a key/value)? Ideas?

Thanks!

--D

[David Notik]

I can just store an index. lowercase_users_index -> points to proper user. It's another hop but I guess best approach? Doesn't look like there's a way to query case-insensitively.

--D

[Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin]

With the new query support, you could store lowercased name in a subkey (/users/Kai/case_folded_name == “kai”).
Then something like usersRef.orderByChild(“case_folded_name”).equalTo(“kai”) should give you the matching user(s).
Don’t forget .indexOn in rules to actually make the query efficient.

It’s becoming standard to offer autocompletion for user mentions. I think using startAt("kai").limit(10) instead of equalTo("kai") would easily support (somewhat dumb) prefix-based autocompletion (you just have to filter the results to those actually starting with “kai”).
But if you want to also complete based on full first/last names, or any substrings, and show the best N matches based on some metric (this matters if you want to already give relevant completions for @k or even @), it will require more work…

Caveats:

• will you allow users to change their (nick)name? then you might have to structure around some persistent id that isn’t the username anyway.
• if you allow both “KaI” and “kAi” as users, who does @kai refer to? Perhaps it’s simpler to force lowercase usernames but show user-chosen display name in UI. But then what do you do when a user accustomed to display names assumes that just typing @Display Name works (ignorign autocomplete’s offer of @username Display Name). SE has a complex DWIM algorithm, but I wouldn’t go there if I can avoid it…

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[Jacob Wenger]

Hey David,

First off, Beni is exactly correct (thanks Beni!) and I would follow his advice on this, with one change. I would just store all your keys names in lowercase. As Beni said, you cannot have different users "kai" and "Kai" and "kAi" since they all map to @kai. So just store your key names as lowercase, and then have a key called "username" which stores it in the case-sensitive way your user wants. Then, to query usernames, you can just do an orderByKey() instead of having to use orderByChild("case_folded_name").

Beni's solution works, but I think this is a bit more straightforward.

Jacob

[David Notik]

Awesome answers. Thank you Beni and Jacob!

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