Introduction

GraphQL entities play a vital role in Graphweaver. They are responsible for defining the data schema and handling data operations in GraphQL APIs.

By understanding how to create and customise these entities, you can unleash the full potential of GraphQL in your applications.

Overview of GraphQL Entities

In GraphQL, entities represent the objects or data types in your system. They define the fields and relationships that can be queried and mutated.

They are also responsible for connecting the data provider to Graphweaver which resolves the queries and mutations against the underlying data sources.

GraphWeaver simplifies the creation and integration of entities by providing a set of tools and abstractions. It allows you to define entities for different data providers, such as databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and external services (REST, Xero). You can connect these entities to the GraphQL layer and map data sources to GraphQL attributes.

Creating Data Provider Entities

To start with, you need to create entities in the respective data providers. For example, if you're working with a MySQL database, you would create a database entity to represent a table. This entity defines the attributes and structure of the data in the database.

There is more on this in the data entities section.

For this example we will look to create a GraphQL entity for a Task data entity. This data entity is a table held in MySQL database, it looks like this:

import { BigIntType, Entity, PrimaryKey, Property } from '@mikro-orm/core';
import { BaseEntity, ExternalIdField } from '@exogee/graphweaver-mikroorm';

@Entity()
export class Task extends BaseEntity {
	@PrimaryKey({ type: BigIntType })
	id!: string;

	@Property({ type: String })
	description!: string;

	@ExternalIdField({ from: 'user' })
	@Property({ type: BigIntType })
	userId!: string;
}

Now we have defined the data entity we can attach it to a GraphQL entity.

Defining GraphQL Entities for Different Data Providers

In Graphweaver, you can define GraphQL entities to expose the data from the data providers. The process involves creating GraphQL entities that correspond to the data provider entities.

Let’s look at connecting the Task data entity from above.

Creating GraphQL Entities