GraphQL Tutorial #12 - Author Type

Key Takeaways

all right and so now we've created our schema we have a book type and a requir e and we can make requests from the front end to get the data so now I just want to make it a little bit more complex and introduce another type and that is going to be the author type so first of all let's create some dummy data for the authors I've already copied this and I'm going to paste it in so just three authors Patrick Rothfuss Brandon Sanderson and terry pratchet they all have a name property an age and an ID as well now then we need to create a type first of all for this author much like we create air created a type for the book right here we're going to do the same kind of thing so instead of me writing it all out again I'm going to copy this and paste it down below and I'm going to change book to author and then down below the fields first of all the name is gonna be author then the fields the ID is still going to be of type graph QL ID the name is still going to be a temp graphic above string we don't have a genre property on this author type instead we have an age property so let's replace that and it's not going to be a graph QL string this time because it's an integer so we need to grab a different type up here called graph QL int so let's grab that graph QL int like so and then down here we can say that the age is of type graph QL int instead of string and there we go that is our author type so like I said before we're going to be doing this kind of thing over and over again where we're making graph QL object types like so and they're very similar to each other it's only really the name and the fields that change and we're also going to be making multiple requir types so we have books and we have authors but at the minute we're only able to query a book so we need to name another field author so that we can query an author as well so let's do that first of all I'm going to place a comma after the closing brace for the book and name this requiere author now then this is going to be of type or the type and then underneath the arcs that we expect to come along with this query is again it going to be an ID because I need to know which ID which author ID I need to grab from up here alright so the user when they're making a request or a query is gonna have to pass through the ID much like they did with the book so this ID down here is going to have a type property of graph QL ID again and then finally we have the resolve function and inside we take the parents and the arcs alright then so remember when a user makes a query for an author they're going to pass through the ID and that will become attached to the arcs so again we have access to that ID property in here so then what we need to do is find the author based on the ID that comes along with the query so again we can say we turn and then underscore dot find we're using a lodash method here and then this time instead of finding inside the books array we're going to look inside the authors array because that's what this thing here is called authors write and then inside this authors array we're going to look for a book which has an ID property which matches our cid the ID that comes along with the query so we're returning that now so that's all there is to it we've made a book query right here we've also made an author query and instead of just opening up new calibration need a little coal on there and that will do so let's save this and I'm gonna refresh over here and this time what I'm going to do is first of all click on root query type and you can see now we can query both book and an author so if I click on author we can see we have access to these properties on an author the ID the name and the age and if we go to query it we have to use the keyword author and pass in an d so let's do that let's instead of querying a book query and author will leave the ID is 2 that's absolutely fine we can ask for the name of the author but we don't have a genre property on an author but we do have an age property and an ID property so let's ask for both of those so click Play and we get this author object back the name is Brandon Sanderson age 42 ID is 2 awesome let's try doing it without a couple of properties so without the age that works without the ID rather and without the age and that works as well if we change the ID to 3 we get terry pratchett and if we change the ID to 1 we get patrick rothfuss alright then so this is all working how simple was that I mean once we've got the basics down to create more require ease and more object types is very very simple indeed now remember we said on this fields property right here that we're going to wrap everything inside a function now I said that was because when we have dependencies on one type to another then graph QL might not recognize those dependencies because one is defined before the other so I'm going to explain exactly what that means when we look at tight relations in the next tutorial