trjhtr

I'm in the process of creating a simple registration system for my school district using Firebase as the database. I need two things for the client: the list of available courses and the courses a user has registered for.

Following the Firebase documentation, I'm trying to keep my tree as flat as possible (full example below). I've set up an index of courses and a user index. I write registrations to both at the same time.

 courses: // index all the courses available
 key1: 
 title: "Course 1",
 desc: "This is a description string.",
 date: 2018-01-01 12:00:00Z 
 members: 
 user1: true
 ...
 
 , 
 key2 ... ,
 ,
 users: // track individual user registrations
 user1: 
 key1: true,
 ...
 ,
 user2: ... 
 

I'm having a hard time getting the client to display user registrations because I'm trying to reference the courses index via key. I'm thinking my JSON structure needs to change, but I'm not entirely sure how to do that without too much nesting or repetition (and it's possible I'm overthinking this).

Would it make more sense to do something like this in the users index rather than trying to reference back and forth?

users: // track individual user registrations with full details
 user1: 
 key1: 
 title: "Course 1",
 date: "2018-01-01 12:00:00Z"
 ,
 key2: ... 
 ,
 user2: ...