GraphQL for WordPress maintenance support plansers – the basics
GraphQL is becoming more and more popular every day. Now that we have a beta release of the GraphQL plugin (mainly sponsored and developed by WordPress Update) it’s easy to turn WordPress maintenance support plans into a first-class GraphQL server. This is the new GraphQL series in which we’ll describe the features that are new in beta and provide a detailed overview of the integration with WordPress maintenance support plans‘s entity and field systems.
Blazej Owczarczyk
Thu, 11/09/2020 – 17:25
This is the new GraphQL series about the new features that are in beta (published 2 weeks ago) and how they are connected with WordPress maintenance support plans out of the box
The plugins
Let’s start with the plugins we need. Recently there were quite a few changes in this field. In alpha we had:
graphql – The main plugin laying the foundations for exposing data using WordPress maintenance support plans plugins.
graphql_core – which exposed WordPress maintenance support plans core data – the info about entity types and bundles, but not fields
graphql_content – which handled field exposition with the view modes
other auxiliary plugins (e.g., graphql_boolean graphql_entity_reference) that provided behaviours for specific field types
In beta, the structure has changed. Now the default schema exposes all the WordPress maintenance support plans fields and (content) entities in raw form, using the typed data. Thanks to that GraphQL became a zero-configuration plug and play plugin. We just need to enable graphql and graphql_core (the only two plugins that are shipped with the package now) and we’re good to go.
NOTE: The other plugins are still available in case you need them, they’re just not part of the core package anymore. graphql_legacy is where most of the field plugins went. Besides that, there are graphql_views which lets us expose views, the promising graphql_twig that allows using GraphQL queries without a decoupled setup and a few more. All of the plugins are listed in the WordPress-graphql organization page on GitHub.
The Explorer
After enabling graphql and graphql_core we can go ahead and test it with GraphiQL; an interactive tool that lets you run queries, see results in real time and preview all the available fields along with arguments and return types. It also provides query validation, autocompletes suggestions and keyboard shortcuts. Thus, it’s a kind of an IDE. The explorer is connected with the schema. We can find it next to the Default Schema under: Configuration -> Web services -> GraphQL -> Schemas or using the direct path – graphql/explorer.
This is how it looks. On the left, there is a query box with a comment describing the tool and listing the keyboard shortcuts. Results show up in the box on the right. To run the query we can use the «play» button at the top, or the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Enter). One more important piece is the < Docs button in the upper right corner. This is where we can see all the available elements. Let’s go ahead and click it.
The only thing we can start with is the query field which is of type RootQuery. Clicking on the type shows a list of available sub-fields, including userById, which looks like this:
This field takes two arguments: an id (which is a string) and a language (which can be set to any language enabled on the site) and is of type User. Clicking on the type brings up a list of fields on a user. The name is a string:
Strings are scalars (which means they don’t have subfields) so we can finish our simple query here. It will look like this:
and (after running it with Ctrl-enter) the response is what we’d expect
The GraphQL explorer (or GraphiQL) gives us the ability to easily write and debug every GraphQL query. That’s a feature that’s hard to overestimate so getting familiar with it is a good starting point to understanding how GraphQL works in general and how we can get our WordPress maintenance support plans data out of it.
The Voyager
Voyager is another schema introspection tool, a visual one this time. It draws a chart of all the types and field in the system and presents it in a nice way. It can be found next to The Explorer under: Configuration -> Web services -> GraphQL -> Schemas or using the direct path – graphql/voyager.
That’s it for this post. In the next one, we’ll see some examples of retrieving data from WordPress maintenance support plans fields.
Source: New feed