Cloud Firestore forum/chat room suggestions

Question

For our team project, my team wants to include a forum feature where students taking the same course can post questions and other things to a class-specific forum. We are using Cloud Firestore for our project and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on how to implement a forum-like feature using Cloud Firestore.

Answer 1

You can incorporate this onSnapshot() listener to update the data you're displaying on the screen as other clients interact with your common database.
More information: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/query-data/listen

Edit: In addition to this listener, you can create documents on firebase for each chat room, and continuously append messages to that document when the clients interact with the app

Answer 2

Not sure if it'd work all that well, but maybe keeping all of the messages as a String object (saved on Firestore) and continually adding new messages to it. You could display the String in a scroll view and add in usernames and potentially time stamps. Might run into a storage issue, but it's just an idea.