MakerKit Data Model

MakerKit's data model is voluntarily as simple as possible, with a limited set of assumptions.

MakerKit is not supposed to be a finite product but a solid foundation on which it is quick to get started and build your SaaS product.

To summarize, the Firestore model contains three main entities: users, organizations, and invites.

1. Users: a Firestore representation of the authentication database. In fact, to store data about users, we need to create a user record within our /users collection in Firestore
2. Organizations: Organizations are groups of users. Here, we store the list of members that belong to the organizations and everything that needs to be shared between the users: for example, templates, settings, integrations, and so on.
3. Invites: invites are a sub-collection of organizations used to store invitations that users can accept.

Users

Users are, of course, foundational to any application.

If a user signed in using Firebase Authentication, it merely means we have verified their credentials, not that they have an account.

We have to create an additional collection to store a user's data, such as:

• settings
• the memberships they belong to
• any other information which is not possible to update using their Authentication record (profile photo, name, email, and sign-in providers)

We only store the user's organizations as an object on the users collections by default.

The Firestore model looks like something similar:

- users
  - [userId]:
    - ... user data

We store the relationships between users and organizations within the Organizations collection.

Organizations

Organizations are groups of users.

If the name doesn't suit your domain, don't worry: you can always change the terminology using the localization files.

A user can belong to one or many organizations: each organization lists its members in an object, similar to what we do with users.

Below is what the Organizations schema looks like:

- organizations
  - [organizationId]
      - name
      - timezone
      - members
        - [memberId]
          - role
          - user // this is a Firestore reference
  }

Of course, we can assign a name to every organization and a timezone property (before you realize you're going to need it).

We define each membership by the user ID. Each membership contains the following information:

• the user role
• the user reference to /users/[userId]

Thus, we store the role in both collections to reduce the number of reads when we query the project members: we need to keep them in sync.

User Roles

By default, MakerKit defines three roles: Owner (can be only one), Admin, and Member.

This enum is hierarchical and associated with a number:

enum MembershipRole {
  Member,    // 0
  Admin,     // 1
  Owner      // 2
}

An Admin can do anything a member can do, and an Owner can do anything an Admin can.

Invites

To create an invite to join an organization, we use a new collection invites placed below an organization document: for example, /organizations/1/invites/1.

The invite's interface is also straightforward:

interface MembershipInvite {
  code: string;
  email: string;
  role: MembershipRole;
  expiresAt: number;
  organization: {
    id: string;
    name: string;
  };
}

• the email property represents the email of the user invited. The application supports users signing up with a different email: you have to change this if you wish to disallow it
• the role is the assigned role, which cannot be Owner
• the code property is the unique identifier from which the user can access the invite through a link
• the expiresAt property is the Unix timestamp when the invite will expire. By default, it's going to be one week
• the organization object duplicates some valuable data from its parent (which saves us from rereading the document)