So I am working on a small web app and I am using Firebase for the back-end. It's a small chat application and I am trying to store the messages of a person in the following form:

{ "John" : {0: "hello",1:"how are you?".2:"what are you doing?" }}

I am storing the person's name in a variable called my_name. My Firebase reference is called ref. Say I set my_name as,

var my_name = "John";

and then do

ref.set({my_name : {0:"Hello"}});

It stores the data as

{my_name : {0:"Hello"}}

instead of

{"John" : {0:"Hello"}}

How can I store it so that it uses the assigned value of my_var ?

So I am working on a small web app and I am using Firebase for the back-end. It's a small chat application and I am trying to store the messages of a person in the following form:

{ "John" : {0: "hello",1:"how are you?".2:"what are you doing?" }}

I am storing the person's name in a variable called my_name. My Firebase reference is called ref. Say I set my_name as,

var my_name = "John";

and then do

ref.set({my_name : {0:"Hello"}});

It stores the data as

{my_name : {0:"Hello"}}

instead of

{"John" : {0:"Hello"}}

How can I store it so that it uses the assigned value of my_var ?

• javascript
• html
• css
• json
• firebase

• Why is the chat data being saved as an array? That's probably going to cause issues later. When storing chat data like this, a better option may be to push() to generate node names and store the messages as a key:value pair within each node. Doing it like that will enable you to store who the message is from and to as well as timestamp, perform queries and other details. Also, you have a period in your example (.2) instead of a ma. – Jay Commented Mar 22, 2016 at 14:48

3 Answers 3

Try putting brackets around your property name like so:

var my_name = 'John';

ref.set({
  [my_name]: { 0: "Hello" }
});

Create a JS object like this

var obj = {};
obj[my_name] = "{ 0: "Hello" }";

then save this to Firebase

ref.set(obj);

Check your {} in set.

var car = {type:"Fiat", model:"500", color:"white"};

        function writeData() {
            firebase.database().ref('cars/'+ dateToInsert).set(
                car
            );

That save:
type:"Fiat"
model:"500"
color:"white"

        function writeData() {
            firebase.database().ref('cars/'+ dateToInsert).set({
                car
            });

That save:

car:
- type:"Fiat"
- model:"500"
- color:"white"