How are people dealing with the Timestamp values that come from Firestore?

[devth]

In my experience I always need to convert firebase.firestore.Timestamps to Dates so I can work with JS date libs, like date-fns. That means I end up with annoying/gross pollutions like:

  // in a component
  const commentsRef = post.ref.collection("comments");

  const { data: commentsData } = useFirestoreCollectionData<PostComment>(
    commentsRef,
    {
      idField: "id",
    }
  );
  const comments = commentsData ? commentsData.map(shallowTSToDates) : [];

// utils
export const firestoreTsToDate = ({
  seconds,
  _seconds,
  nanoseconds,
}: SerializedTs): Date =>
  new Timestamp(seconds || _seconds || 0, nanoseconds).toDate();

// for every value in a map, if the value looks like a Firestore Timestamp,
// convert it to a JS Date
export const shallowTSToDates = <T extends Record<string, unknown>>(
  object?: T
): T =>
  mapValues(object, (v) =>
    isNumber((v as any)?.seconds) && isNumber((v as any)?.nanoseconds)
      ? firestoreTsToDate(v as SerializedTs)
      : v
  ) as T;

💡 Would it make sense for reactfire's hooks to have the option to do this automatically?

Maybe something like:

  // in a component
  const commentsRef = post.ref.collection("comments");

  const { data: commentsData } = useFirestoreCollectionData<PostComment>(
    commentsRef,
    {
      idField: "id",
      convertTimestamps: true,
    }
  );

(Sidenote: I really want to be able to specify those ReactFireOptions globally once, because I'd always use the exact same options everywhere).

[devth]

Anyone have thoughts on this? I'd be happy to brainstorm, contrib something, etc. Seems like low hanging fruit with a potential big increase in developer experience.

[DaatKruby]

100% would be nice to have a nice approach to do this