What's New in pg_graphql v1.2

It's been 4 months since the 1.0.0 release of pg_graphql. Since then, we’ve pushed several features to improve the APIs that pg_graphql produces.

In this article, we’ll walk through those features and show examples of each.

📢 These features are only available on projects with Postgres version 15.1.0.63 or higher. For help with upgrading, please review the migrating and upgrading projects guide.

View Support

Prior to v1.1, pg_graphql would only reflect standard tables. Since then, views, materialized views, and foreign tables are now also reflected in the GraphQL schema.

For example:

create view "ProjectOwner" as
  select
    acc.id,
    acc.name
  from
    account as acc
    join role as r on r.id = acc.role_id
  where acc.role = 'project_owner';

Since all entities exposed by pg_graphql require primary keys, we must define that constraint for the view. We do that using a comment directive:

comment on view "ProjectOwner"
  is '@graphql({"primary_key_columns": ["id"]})';

Which yields the GraphQL type:

type ProjectOwner implements Node {
  nodeId: ID!
  id: UUID!
  name: String
}

With associated Edge and Connection types. That enables querying via:

{
  projectOwnerCollection(first: 2) {
    edges {
      node {
        nodeId
        name
      }
    }
  }
}

Additionally, simple views automatically support mutation events like inserts and updates. You might use these to migrate underlying tables while maintaining backwards compatibility with previous API versions.

Filtering

Filtering in SQL is endlessly flexible. We’ve taken two incremental steps to bring more of that flexibility to the GraphQL interface.

`is null` and `is not null`

Handling null values can be tricky in both SQL and GraphQL. However, there are similarities we can take advantage of. In pg_graphql, every scalar data type has its own filter type, such as IntFilter and StringFilter. Each of these filter types now includes an is argument, which allows you to filter based on whether a value is null or not null. You can do this by using {is: NULL} for null values and {is: NOT_NULL} for non-null values.

enum FilterIs {
    NULL
    NOT_NULL
}
type IntFilter {
    ...
    is: FilterIs
}

For example:

{
  blogCollection(filter: { name: {is: NULL}}) {
    ...
  }
}

to return all blogs where the name is null.

`like`, `ilike`, and `startsWith`

Text filtering options in pg_graphql have historically been restricted to equality checks. The hesitation was due to concerns about exposing a default filter that is difficult to index. The combination of citext and PGroonga available on the platform solves those scalability risks and enabled us to expand the StringFilter with options for like ilike and startsWith.

input StringFilter {
  eq: String
  ...
  startsWith: String
  like: String
  ilike: String
}

Note that startsWith filters should be preferred where appropriate because they can leverage simple B-Tree indexes to improve performance.

{
  generalLedgerCollection(filter: { identifierCode: { startsWith: "BX1:" } }) {
    edges {
      node {
        nodeId
        identifierCode
        amount
      }
    }
  }
}

GraphQL directives `@skip` and `@include`

The GraphQL spec has evolved over time. Although the spec is clear, it is common for GraphQL servers to selectively omit some chunks of functionality. For example, some frameworks intentionally do not expose an introspection schema as a form of security through obscurity.

pg_graphql aims to be unopinionated and adhere exactly to the spec. The @skip and @include directives are part of the GraphQL core specification and are now functional.

The @skip directive in GraphQL is used to conditionally skip a field or fragment during query execution based on a Boolean variable. It can be used to make the query more efficient by reducing the amount of data retrieved from the server.

The @include directive is the mirror of @skip where a field or fragment is conditionally included depending on the value of a Boolean variable.

Here's an example of how the @skip directive can be used in a GraphQL query:

query getBooks($includeDetails: Boolean!) {
  booksCollection {
    edges {
      node {
        id
        title
        description @skip(if: $includeDetails)
      }
    }
  }
}

User Defined Descriptions

Users can now use the comment directive system to assign descriptions to tables, views and columns.

create table public.book(
    id int primary key,
    title text not null
);
comment on table public.book
is e'@graphql({"description": "a library book"})';
comment on column public.book.title
is e'@graphql({"description": "the title of the book"})';

GraphQL IDEs, such as GraphiQL render those descriptions, allowing developers to provide clearer API documentation.

Roadmap

The headline features we aim to launch in coming releases of pg_graphql include:

Support for user-defined functions: GitHub issue
Support for nested inserts: GitHub issue
An alternative approach to computed relationships based on SQL functions returning SET OF rather than comment directives (compatible with PostgREST)