How To Sort Value Inside A Firebase Child To The Rest?

In my firebase I have several events, each with title and date string: { 'events': { '-JscIDsctxSa2QmMK4Mv': { 'date': 'Friday, June 19, 2015',

Solution 1:

Firebase doesn't have a date type, since JSON doesn't have it. So it has no idea that there're stored dates in those strings. For sorting purposes you have to store a primitive type that represents these dates and gives required order of sorting when compared as a string or number.

For example: a timestamp. Given date is a JS date object, add sortDate: date.getTime() to each object when saving.

{
  "events": {
    "-JscIDsctxSa2QmMK4Mv": {
        "date": "Friday, June 19, 2015",
        "sortDate": 1434697200000,
        "title": "Event Two"
    },
    "-Jswff0o9bWJeDmUoSA9": {
        "date": "Friday, June 12, 2015",
        "sortDate": 1434092400000,
        "title": "Event One"
    },
    "-JscIs_oMCJ9aT6-JWDg": {
        "date": "Monday, August 10, 2015",
        "sortDate": 1439190000000,
        "title": "Event Three"
    }
  }
}

And then:

ref.orderByChild("sortDate")...