How to Modify Firestore Query to Return All Gender Values When No Specific Gender is Specified After Recent Updates

Question

Before the recent updates, my application's Firestore query was set up as follows: if the user did not specify a gender, the query would return all results for both 'Female' and 'Male' by assigning a null value to the gender filter. This was achieved using the following code:

.where('gender', isEqualTo: genderM())

dynamic genderM(){
    if(gender=='Female'){
      return 'Female';
    }else if(gender=='Male'){
      return 'Male';
    }else{
      return null;
    }
  }

However, after the recent updates, this setup no longer returns all possible gender values when genderM() returns null. Given that I cannot modify the existing gender fields in the database because my app has already been published and contains extensive data, how can I adjust the Firestore query to include all gender results when the user wants all of them? I need a solution that maintains compatibility with the existing database schema.

Answer 1

The simplest way is to only add the gender condition when the gender variable has a value. I'm not sure what programming language you are using, but it'd be something like this:

query = ... // however you already initialize the variable
if(gender=='Female'){
  query = query.where('gender', isEqualTo: 'Female');
}else if(gender=='Male'){
  query = query.where('gender', isEqualTo: 'Male');
}