graphql-compose-leveler

Lets GraphQL servers allow client queries to mutate the shape of response objects.

A graphql-leveler inspired util for use with graphql-compose.

It allows GraphQL servers built with graphql-compose to let clients modify the output format by flattenning deeper structures or, to the contrary, adding depth where GraphQL objects would normally return flat fields.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents generated with DocToc

• Background
• Install
• Usage
• Development
  • TODO
• Contribute
  • Maintainers
  • Thanks

Background

A fellow developer once asked for a feature that graphql-leveler provides, but our API was built using the awesome library called graphql-compose. It required replacing all GraphQLObjectTypes in the source code of the app with LevelerObjectType.

But since we used graphql-compose, the TypeComposer interface and its GraphQL-schema parser, we couldn't always replace the base type easily (in schema syntax).

On the other hand, graphql-compose allowed us to modify the types anytime before the schema is finally generated and passed to the GraphQL server. So after discovering that graphql-leveler's code is very simple, I've reimplemented its functionality using TypeComposer magic, and added a _pluck on top of its _get.

Install

npm install --save graphql-compose-leveler

const levelerize = require("graphql-compose-leveler");
 
// You usually start with creating a ComposeStorage
const GQC = new ComposeStorage();
// ... building API ...
// now add leveler's magic to all queries in rootQuery 
levelerize(GQC.rootQuery());
// ... and finally build schema:
const schema = GQC.buildSchema();

Usage

Now having a response that would look like this:

{
  "a": {
    "very": {
      "deeply": {
        "nested": {
          "single": "value",
          "list": [
            {
              "item": "of"
            }, {
              "item": "values"
            }
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

You can query like you used to:

query {
  a {
    very {
      deeply {
        nested {
          single
          list {
            item
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

but also:

query {
  a { thing: _get(path: "very.deeply.nested.single") }
}

which returns

{
  "a": {
    "thing": "value"
  }
}

and/or

query {
  a { 
    thing: _pluck(list: "very.deeply.nested.list", path: "item") 
  }
}

which returns:

{
  "a": {
    "thing": ["of", "values"]
  }
}

Development

This helper is written in TypeScript, and lib.js is updated automatically. The actual file you want to edit is lib.ts.

Use

npm run build

to update the JS and rebuild README table of contents.

TODO

• Unit tests, of course. @chasingmaxwell, can I reuse yours? :)

Contribute

PRs accepted. Semver versioning used.

Maintainers

• Core developer: Cezar Pokorski

Thanks

• Pavel Chertorogov (@nodkz) 🍻 for the awesome graphql-compose library that is gold when building JS/TS services exposing a GraphQL API.

  Also thanks for the hint to use JSON rather than AnyScalar

• Peter Sieg (@chasingmaxwell) 🍺 for graphql-leveler that was the original implementation for pure GraphQL projects.