Chatto | lightweight framework to build chat applications | iOS library

When you attach a listener for the ChildAdded event, it is called immediately for each existing child, and then for each child added afterwards. There is no way to change this behavior.

If you don't want to receive a notification for existing child nodes, you'll need to exclude those using a query/condition. For example, if all your nodes have a timestamp of when they were added, you can start listening for nodes created after "now" with something like:

It sounds like you want to get more granular information about the data that was modified in the database in your code. In that case you'll be better off using a ChildEventListener instead of a ValueEventListener.

With ChildEventListener you get called for each child that was added, updated, removed or moved, and you can then easily update the UI based on that. For example, if you only want to add new nodes from the database to your list, you'd do something like: