apollo-server/docs/source/essentials/schema.md

title	sidebar_title
Building a GraphQL schema	Building a schema

Overview

Estimated time: About 6 minutes.

A GraphQL schema is at the center of any GraphQL server implementation and describes the functionality available to the clients which connect to it.

The core building block within a schema is the "type". Types provide a wide-range of functionality within a schema, including the ability to:

• Create relationships between types (e.g. between a Book and an Author).
• Define which data-fetching (querying) and data-manipulation (mutating) operations can be executed by the client.
• If desired, self-explain what capabilities are available to the client (via introspection).

By the end of this page, we hope to have explained the power of types and how they relate to a GraphQL server.

Schema Definition Language (SDL)

To make it easy to understand the capabilities of a server, GraphQL implements a human-readable schema syntax known as its Schema Definition Language, or "SDL". This GraphQL-specific syntax is encoded as a String type.

The SDL is used to express the "types" available within a schema and how those types relate to each other. In a simple example involving books and authors, the SDL might declare:

type Book {
  title: String
  author: Author
}

type Author {
  name: String
  books: [Book]
}

It's important to note that these declarations express the relationships and the shape of the data to return, not where the data comes from or how it might be stored - which will be covered outside the SDL.

By drawing these logical connections in the schema, we can allow the client (which is often a human developer, designing a front-end) to see what data is available and request it in a single optimized query.

Queries

A GraphQL query is for reading data and comparable to the GET verb in REST-based APIs.

Thanks to the relationships which have been defined in the SDL, the client can expect that the shape of the data returned will match the shape of the query it sends.

In order to define what queries are possible on a server, a special Query type is defined within the SDL. The Query type is one of many root-level types, but the Query type specializes in fetching data and acts as the entry-point to other types within the schema.

Using the books and author example we created in the SDL example above, we can define multiple queries which are available on a server:

type Query {
  getBooks: [Book]
  getAuthors: [Author]
}

In this Query type, we define two types of queries which are available on this GraphQL server:

• getBooks: which returns a list of Book objects.
• getAuthors: which returns a list of Author objects.

Those familiar with REST-based APIs would normally find these located on separate end-points (e.g. /api/books and /api/authors), but GraphQL allows them to be queried at the same time and returned at once.

Using this query, a client could request a list of all books and a separate list of all authors by sending a single query with exactly the types it wishes to receive in return:

query {
  getBooks {
    title
  }

  getAuthors {
    name
  }
}

The data returned from this query would look like:

{
  "data": {
    "getBooks": [
      {
        "title": "..."
      },
      ...
    ],
    "getAuthors": [
      {
        "name": "..."
      },
      ...
    ]
  }
}

Of course, when displaying this data on the client, it might be desirable for the Author to be within the Book that the author wrote.

Thanks to the relationship between Book and Author, which is defined in the SDL above, this query would look like:

query {
  getBooks {
    title
    author {
      name
    }
  }
}

And, without additional effort on its part, the client would receive the information in the same shape as the request:

{
  "data": {
    "getBooks": [
      {
        "title": "..."
        "author": {
          "name": "..."
        }
      },
      ...
    ]
  }
}

Query arguments

TODO? Should this section exist here?

Mutations

Mutations are operations sent to the server to create, update or delete data. These are comparable to the PUT, POST, PATCH and DELETE verbs on REST-based APIs.

Much like how the Query type defines the entry-points for data-fetching operations on a GraphQL server, the root-level Mutation type specifies the entry points for data-manipulation operations.

For example, when imagining a situation where the API supported adding a new Book, the SDL might implement the following Mutation type:

type Mutation {
  addBook(title: String, author: String): Book
}

This implements a single addBook mutation which accepts a title attribute (a String) and returns the newly-created Book object.

The new Book object matches the previously-created Book type and, much like the Query type, the fields we desire to receive back from the operation are specified when sending the mutation:

mutation {
  addBook(title: "Fox in Socks", author: "Dr. Seuss") {
    title
    author {
      name
    }
  }
}

The result of this mutation would be:

{
  "data": {
    "addBook": {
      {
        "title": "Fox in Socks",
        "author": {
          "name": "Dr. Seuss"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Multiple mutations may be sent in the same request, however they will be executed in the order they are provided (in series), in order to avoid race-conditions within the operation.

Introspection and documentation

Introspection is an optional feature, enabled by default during development, which allows clients to explore the types a GraphQL.

Furthermore, by using (optional) string literals within the schema, it's possible to explain exactly what a field does:

type Book {
  "Returns the title of the book, as listed in the card catalog."
  title: String
}

type Query {
  "Fetch a list of our extensive book collection!"
  getBooks: [Book]
}

This makes SDL-generation even easier since many GraphQL tools auto-complete the field names (along with descriptions, when available) at each level of a GraphQL operation.

Variables

SCRATCHPAD

Query

• GraphQL query defines the shape of data that will be returned by a particular request
  • make sure it has arguments
• This query is then checked again the server's schema
  • looks like this:

Mutation

• Mutations exist because they have special argument types called Input types
• Input types only contain scalar types and cannot have any other input types
  • ensures that data from the client is always serializable and we don't lose any information, since circular references don't survive network call