Working with Federation

Under the hood, Apollo Connectors are Apollo Federation. Instead of resolving fields by calling a GraphQL subgraph, connectors enable federation to resolve fields from other kinds of APIs like REST.

This means that connectors work seamlessly with multiple subgraphs composed together into a supergraph. You can use connectors to extend and reference entities from other subgraphs.

Extend entities

Connectors let you augment entities in your supergraph with data from REST APIs.

Suppose your supergraph already has a products subgraph that provides the id, name, and price of a Product entity:

1type Product @key(fields: "id") {
2  id: ID!
3  name: String
4  price: Int
5}

You can add product review data from a REST API using the @connect directive like so:

1type Product @key(fields: "id") {
2  id: ID!
3  reviews: [Review]
4    @connect(
5      http: { GET: "https://reviews.example.com/reviews?product_id={$this.id}" }
6      selection: """
7      $.results {
8        id
9        title
10        body
11        rating
12      }
13      """
14    )
15}
16
17type Review {
18  id: ID!
19  title: String
20  body: String
21  rating: Int
22}

The @connect directive defines the reviews fields to request from the /reviews endpoint. The id used as a parameter in the endpoint URL comes from the product's id field, which comes from another subgraph.

Reference entities

If your REST API provides foreign key references, you can use them to reference entities and fetch corresponding fields from a different subgraph.

For example, if your REST API lets you fetch a user's favorite products and provides those products' IDs, you can use the @connect directive to reference the Product entity:

1type User @key(fields: "id") {
2  id: ID!
3  favoriteProducts: [Product]
4    @connect(
5      http: { GET: "https://products.example.com/users/{$this.id}/favorites" }
6      selection: """
7      $.results {
8        id: product_id
9      }
10      """
11    )
12}
13
14type Product @key(fields: "id", resolvable: false) {
15  id: ID!
16}

Add a computed field using @requires

1type Product @key(fields: "id") {
2  id: ID!
3  weight: Int @external
4  shippingCost(zipCode: String): Int
5    @requires(fields: "weight")
6    @connect(
7      http: {
8        GET: "https://api.example.com/shipping?zip={$args.zipCode}&weight={$this.weight}"
9      }
10      selection: "$.result"
11    )
12}

Compatibility with other Federation features

Connectors work seamlessly with most other Federation features. You can use directives like @tag, @inaccessible, @provides, and more alongside @connect.