by Manuel Spigolon

You are going to read about a GraphQL project that is perfect for playing with to skill up on GraphQL by using:

• The Mercurius GraphQL server
• The Fastify web framework
• The GraphQL Federation architecture

This project is a playground to test the GraphQL Federation architecture with the Mercurius server.

The Federation architecture is a way to share data between distributed GraphQL servers applying the microservices architecture into the GraphQL standard.

The project spins up 2 + 1 nodes:

• user: it represents the user data
• team: it represents a set of users
• the gateway: it connects all the nodes into a federation graph

⚠️ As prerequisites, you should be familiar with the GraphQL basic concepts. Before continuing with this article, you can take a tour of the official tutorial.

Creating a GraphQL Node

Creating a node by using the Fastify+Mercurius toolkit is very easy. You need to:

• Create a Fastify instance
• Register the Mercurius plugin

async function buildService (name, { schema, resolvers, loaders }) {
  const app = Fastify({ 
    logger: {
      name,
      level: 'info'
    }
  })

  app.register(GQL, {
    schema, // the GraphQL schema
    resolvers, // the GraphQL resolvers
    loaders, // the GraphQL loaders
    federationMetadata: true,
    allowBatchedQueries: true
  })

  await app.listen() // start the node
}

By implementing the buildService function, you can focus on the business logic of your node without worrying about the infrastructure.

The user GraphQL Node

Now we can focus on the business logic of the node by creating a node-1.js file.

The User is made of a name property and it always has a bestFriend. We need a simple Query to get a user too.

So, the node must:

• access to the users dataset
• expose the User GraphQL type
• implement a simple query to get a user

The schema will look like this:

type Query {
  zero: User
}

type User @key(fields: "id") {
  id: ID!
  name: String
  bestFriend: User
}

The implementation of this schema requires:

• A Query.zero resolver that returns the user with id 0
• A User.bestFriend resolver that returns the best friend of the user

Implementing the resolvers is relatively straightforward:

// a fake database
const users = [
  { id: 0, name: 'Mathew Deckow', bestFriendId: 1 },
  { id: 1, name: 'Van McKenzie', bestFriendId: 8 },
  { id: 2, name: 'Jay Roob', bestFriendId: 2 },
  { id: 3, name: 'Deborah Spencer', bestFriendId: 7 },
  { id: 4, name: 'Vivian Murphy', bestFriendId: 6 },
  { id: 5, name: 'Meredith Mitchell', bestFriendId: 0 },
  { id: 6, name: 'Kate Deckow', bestFriendId: 5 },
  { id: 7, name: 'Beth Hodkiewicz IV', bestFriendId: 3 },
  { id: 8, name: 'Sheryl Schaden', bestFriendId: 5 },
  { id: 9, name: 'Heather Veum', bestFriendId: 9 }
]

module.exports = {
  schema,

  resolvers: {
    Query: {
      zero: async function () {
        return users[0]
      }
    },
    User: {
      bestFriend: async function (user) {
        return users[user.bestFriendId]
      }
    }
  },
}

Now you can call this simple node by instantiating it in a start.js file:

const serviceOne = await buildNode('user', require('./node-1'))
const response = await serviceOne.inject({
  method: 'POST',
  url: '/graphql',
  body: {
    query: `{
      zero {
        name
        bestFriend {
          name
        }
      }
    }`
  }
})

And you can see the result:

{
  "data": {
    "zero": {
      "name": "Charlie Pacocha",
      "bestFriend": {
        "name": "Glenda Ankunding"
      }
    }
  }
}

The team GraphQL Node

The team node will have a Query that returns a list of users that compose a team.

The schema will look like this:

type Query {
  myTeam: Team
}

type Team {
  components: [User]
}

type User @key(fields: "id") @extends {
  id: ID! @external
}

As you can see, the @extends directive is used to extend the User GraphQL type and declare the id field as an external field. This is part of the GraphQL Federation standard.

The node-2.js resolver will be very basic, but you can add more complex logic to it. Note that we set the async keyword: you will be able to run asynchronous code in every resolver function!

module.exports = {
  schema,

  resolvers: {
    Query: {
      myTeam: async function () {
        return {
          components: [
            { id: 1 },
            { id: 2 }
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

🔮 Every time you set the @external directive, you must remember to set the special __resolveReference resolver function in the target node.

In this case, we need to update the node-1.js file adding a loader:

module.exports = {
  schema,

  resolvers: {
    Query: {
      zero: function () {
        return users[0]
      }
    },
    User: {
      bestFriend: function (user) {
        return users[user.bestFriendId]
      }
    }
  },

  loaders: {
    User: {
      async __resolveReference (queries, context) {
        return queries.map(({ obj }) => users[+obj.id])
      }
    }
  }
}

Note that the __resolveReference function is defined as loader to solve the N+1 problem. You can add the __resolveReference as resolver too, but you slow down your node: I encourage you to add some console.log and experiment. You will see that:

• The loader's __resolveReference is called grouping the queries by the target type.
• The resolver's __resolveReference is called multiple times for each query with nested fields.
• If the __resolveReference is defined in both the loader and the resolver, the loader's one is called.

The Gateway GraphQL Node

Finally, the last step is to create the gateway node. It is a node that will connect the other nodes with a dedicated GraphQL configuration:

const gateway = Fastify()

gateway.register(GQL, {
  graphiql: true,
  pollingInterval: 2000,
  gateway: {
    services: [
      {
        name: 'user',
        url: 'http://localhost:53114/graphql',
      },
      {
        name: 'team',
        url: 'http://localhost:53115/graphql',
      }
    ]
  }
})

gateway.listen(3000)

Now you can access the GraphQL API from the browser: http://localhost:3000/graphiql and you will be able to run the query:

{
  myTeam {
    components {
      name
      bestFriend {
        name
        bestFriend {
          name
          bestFriend {
            name
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

It is interesting to note the logs of the nodes:

1. During the startup of the gateway, the node-1 and node-2 are queried by the gateway getting the GraphQL schemas.
2. The gateway receives the query to execute, and it will call the team node to get the list of users.
3. The gateway receives the team node's response, and it will call the user node to get the users.
4. The user node resolves the bestFriend field internally using the loader and type's resolver.

# startup
{"level":30,"name":"user","msg":"Server listening at http://127.0.0.1:53176"}
{"level":30,"name":"team","msg":"Server listening at http://127.0.0.1:53177"}
{"level":30,"name":"team","reqId":"req-1","req":{"method":"POST","url":"/graphql","hostname":"localhost:53177","remoteAddress":"127.0.0.1","remotePort":53178},"msg":"incoming request"}
{"level":30,"name":"team","reqId":"req-1","res":{"statusCode":200},"responseTime":6.589166045188904,"msg":"request completed"}
{"level":30,"name":"user","reqId":"req-1","req":{"method":"POST","url":"/graphql","hostname":"localhost:53176","remoteAddress":"127.0.0.1","remotePort":53179},"msg":"incoming request"}
{"level":30,"name":"user","reqId":"req-1","res":{"statusCode":200},"responseTime":1.2786250114440918,"msg":"request completed"}
{"level":30,"name":"gateway","msg":"Server listening at http://127.0.0.1:53208"}
# query execution
{"level":30,"name":"gateway","reqId":"req-1","req":{"method":"POST","url":"/graphql","hostname":"localhost:80","remoteAddress":"127.0.0.1"},"msg":"incoming request"}
{"level":30,"name":"team","reqId":"req-2","req":{"method":"POST","url":"/graphql","hostname":"localhost:53177","remoteAddress":"127.0.0.1","remotePort":53178},"msg":"incoming request"}
{"level":30,"name":"team","reqId":"req-2","res":{"statusCode":200},"responseTime":0.835334062576294,"msg":"request completed"}
{"level":30,"name":"user","reqId":"req-2","req":{"method":"POST","url":"/graphql","hostname":"localhost:53176","remoteAddress":"127.0.0.1","remotePort":53179},"msg":"incoming request"}
{"level":30,"name":"user","queries":[{"obj":{"__typename":"User","id":"1"},"params":{}},{"obj":{"__typename":"User","id":"2"},"params":{}}],"msg":"User.__resolveReference"}
{"level":30,"name":"user","reqId":"req-2","res":{"statusCode":200},"responseTime":2.0201669931411743,"msg":"request completed"}
{"level":30,"name":"gateway","reqId":"req-1","res":{"statusCode":200},"responseTime":7.0754170417785645,"msg":"request completed"}

Now jump into the source code on GitHub and start to play with the GraphQL Federation implemented in Fastify. Comment and share if you enjoyed this article!