Get Dictionary of Users Uid on Firebase - swift

Question

This is my case; I need a dictionary of all of the users in my app to use didSelectRowAt on a UITableView to get the searched users uid.
my firebase database is designed like this:
not allowed to upload Images so link here
Also, I succesfully made a string/dictionary of the users names by doing this;
let rootRef = Database.database().reference()
let query = rootRef.child("users").queryOrdered(byChild: "users")
query.observe(.value) { (snapshot) in
for child in snapshot.children.allObjects as! [DataSnapshot] {
if let value = child.value as? NSDictionary {
// declaring a user in class User() which was made with strings(name, email, ect.)
let user = User()
let name = value["name"] as? String ?? "name not found"
// making the string of it go into the user.name
user.name = name
// appending it into a variable of class user()
self.users.append(user)
}
}
}
I'm not sure how to do this because the uid's are all different and don't have a name to it (ex. email: test#test.com).
Perhaps I need to restructure my database to allow this but I'm not too sure. Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

One way is to keep a field for uid along with the name, email and profileImageURI fields.
let rootRef = Database.database().reference()
guard let uid = rootRef.child("users").childByAutoId().key
Now, send the uid as a field while saving the data to firebase.
While retrieving the data you can map the data as follows :
let query = rootRef.child("users").queryOrdered(byChild: "users")
query.observe(.value) { (snapshot) in
for child in snapshot.children.allObjects as! [DataSnapshot] {
if let value = child.value as? NSDictionary {
// declaring a user in class User() which was made with strings(name, email, etc.)
var dict = [String:String]()
let user = User()
let name = value["name"] as? String ?? "name not found"
// making the string of it go into the user.name
user.name = name
user.uid = value["uid"]
dict[name] = "\(uid)"
}
}