timestamp in firebase/firestore

Question

When I save timestamp dates on firestore, it saves as a timestamp datatype. But when I retrieve the data into React, sometimes it is retrieved as a timestamp and I can convert it to JS date using toDate() but other times is retrieved as {_seconds, _nanoseconds} and I need to convert it manually.

It seems very confusing. Is there a best practise about how to save and how to retrieve dates from Google Firestore? Thanks

Answer 1

The only way to store dates in Firestore is through the Timestamp, you could store them through Strings, but it would be a huge pain to convert it back to Date so there really isn't any other better way to do it, unfortunately.