I am trying to test whether a document exists with title uid. I have confirmed that the document exists in Firestore within the users collection, but doc.exists always returns false. Note that my document uid contains only collections (no fields).

  firebase.auth().onAuthStateChanged((user) => {
          if (user) {
            // User is signed in.
            var uid = user.uid
            db.collection("users").doc(uid)
              .get()
              .then((doc) => {
                console.log(doc)
                if (doc.exists) {
                  console.log('returning user')
                } else {
                  console.log('new user')
                }
            }).catch(function(error) {
                console.log("Error getting document:", error);
            });
          } else {
            // User is signed out.
            // ...
          }

I am trying to test whether a document exists with title uid. I have confirmed that the document exists in Firestore within the users collection, but doc.exists always returns false. Note that my document uid contains only collections (no fields).

  firebase.auth().onAuthStateChanged((user) => {
          if (user) {
            // User is signed in.
            var uid = user.uid
            db.collection("users").doc(uid)
              .get()
              .then((doc) => {
                console.log(doc)
                if (doc.exists) {
                  console.log('returning user')
                } else {
                  console.log('new user')
                }
            }).catch(function(error) {
                console.log("Error getting document:", error);
            });
          } else {
            // User is signed out.
            // ...
          }

• javascript
• firebase
• google-cloud-firestore

• does your console.log(doc) print anything? – Andrew L Commented Jan 2, 2018 at 22:21
• Yes it prints a documentSnapshot object with exists property set to false – astrojams1 Commented Jan 2, 2018 at 22:28

1 Answer 1

This happens because while you had created collections within the document, you never created the document itself. You can tell whether documents exist because if they dont they will show up in Firestore as italics.