Comment by girvo
Quite. Apollo Client is the problem, IMO, not GraphQL.
Though Relay still needs to work on their documentation: Entrypoints are so excellent and yet still are basically bare API docs that sort of rely on internal Meta shit
Quite. Apollo Client is the problem, IMO, not GraphQL.
Though Relay still needs to work on their documentation: Entrypoints are so excellent and yet still are basically bare API docs that sort of rely on internal Meta shit
100% agree on the unnecessary connection between entrypoints and meta internals. I think this is one of the biggest misses in Relay, and severely limits its usefulness in OSS.
If you're interested in entrypoints without the Meta internals, you may be interested in checking out Isograph (which I work on). See e.g. https://isograph.dev/docs/loadable-fields/, where the data + JS for BlogBody is loaded afterward, i.e. entrypoints. It's as simple as annotating a field (in Isograph, components define fields) with @loadable(lazyLoadArtifact: true).
Neat! I basically just reimplemented some of the missing pieces myself, but honestly for the kind of non-work GraphQL/Relay stuff I do React Router with an entry point-like interface for routes (including children!) to feed in route params to loadQuery and the ref to the route itself got me close enough for my purposes
I’ll have a play though, sounds promising :)
Oh this is interesting, sort of seems like the relay-3d thing in some ways?
Yeah, you can get a lot of features out of the same primitive. The primitive (called loadable fields, but you can think of it as a tool to specify a section of a query as loaded later) allows you to support: - live queries (call the loadable field in a setInterval) - pagination (pass different variables and concatenate the result) - defer - loading data in response to a click
And if you also combine this with the fact that JS and fragments are statically associated in Relay, you can get: - entrypoints - 3D (if you just defer components within a type refinement, e.g. here we load ad items only when we encounter an item with typename AdItem https://github.com/isographlabs/isograph/blob/627be45972fc47.... asAdItem is a field that compiles to ... on AdItem in the actual query text)
And all of it is doable with the same set of primitives, and requiring no server support (other than a node field).
Do let me know if you check it out! Or if you get stuck, happy to unblock you/clarify things (it's hard for me to know what is confusing to folks new to the project.)
The docs situation continues to be hilarious and bad, for the gem they have created.
It's the unfortunate situation where those who know, know, and those who do not, blasphemy the whole thing based on misunderstanding.
Super unfortunate, which could be solved by simply moving a little money over to Relay's docs, and working on some marketing materials.