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Ok, so Firebase already has a way to make sure clients can only look at/update data they're authorized to do so?

What about business rules? Is there a way to enforce that, for example, when one product is ordered an additional item is automatically added to a shopping cart (e.g., if I buy a computer, my province requires a recycling fee be paid too)?

Or does this get beyond what Firebase is meant for?

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The rules for the Firebase Database allow read & write access as well as validation. It may not handle every possible case of business logic, but it's a very powerful tool.

A common pattern is to have a server process running that watches parts of the firebase tree and then runs business logic in response to changes.

It's described as client - db - server rather than client - server - db. I believe there are also Firebase queue and task abstractions that make it fairly easy to map a write to a 'backend handler'.

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