graphql / faq

GraphQL FAQ

GraphQL FAQ

This project hopes to collect common questions and answers into peer reviewed and easily digestable form.

Phase 1:

Collect FAQ proposals into the /proposals dir as minimal markdown files collecting links to relevant discussion, issues, comments.

All contributions should be merged quickly.

Phase 2:

Draft content by taking interesting or high-impact questions from /proposals and writing a first draft answer and moving into /drafts. This can be derived by copy-pasting from existing discussion or synthesizing into a new form.

Some review may happen to these PRs, but they should be merged promptly.

Phase 3:

Review and edit drafts by technical writers or native speakers and move to /published.

Peer review should be done before merging, though edits and improvements are welcome.

Phase 4 (can be done earlier):

Build Gatsby site which exposes published FAQs as google-crawlable pages along with a top level page showing all/featured FAQ and a search bar. Use algolia or similar to search across all FAQ.

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faq's Issues

GraphQL wildcard field

I see many people getting confused why GraphQL doesn't have a wildcard field; in fact I see some people calling GraphQL "half baked" and seeing the lack of wildcard as one of the reasons that justify their opinion.

I think this topic should be added to the FAQ. I wasn't comfortable adding a PR to proposals as it's not clear exactly what format the proposal should be in yet (they seem to be placeholders currently?).

IMO the lack of a wildcard field is one of GraphQL's biggest strengths - it forces clients to specify the fields that they need, which has a number of advantages:

• it reduces back-end load, as less data needs to be calculated
• it reduces bandwidth, as no unused data is transferred (no over-fetching)
• most importantly, it enables the schema to be maintained in a versionless way - adding new fields to a type will not affect any existing queries, and we can determine which fields are being used so we know when we can safely remove deprecated fields (should we wish to do so)

Here's a massive conversation about this in the spec repo:

• graphql/graphql-spec#127