3. Apollo RESTDataSource
3m

We know where our data is, and we understand how it's structured. Awesome. Now to access it from our !

Our needs to access that REST API. It could call the API directly using fetch, or we can use a handy helper class called a DataSource. This class takes care of a few challenges and limitations that come with the direct approach.

Hand-drawn illustration depicting a GraphQL server deciding whether to use `fetch` or a data source to retrieve data from the REST API in data-land

To better understand those challenges and limitations, let's start with fetch before we create a DataSource.

When making calls to a REST API in a Node.js environment, we might use a library like axios or node-fetch. These provide easy access to HTTP methods and nice async behavior.

Using node-fetch, retrieving all tracks from our /tracks endpoint looks like this:

fetch("apiUrl/tracks").then(function (response) {
  // do something with our tracks JSON
});

This gives us our array of tracks, but we're still missing author information. For each track in the array, we need to call the /author/:id endpoint like so:

fetch(`apiUrl/author/${authorId}`).then(function (response) {
  // this is the author of our track
});

Let's say our /tracks endpoint returns 100 tracks. Then we'd make one call to get the array, followed by 100 additional calls to get each track's author info.

Now, what if our 100 tracks were all made by the same author? We'd make one call for the tracks, retrieve our 100 tracks, then make 100 calls to get the exact same author.

Sounds pretty inefficient, right? We'd end up making 101 calls where we could have made only two.

This is a classic example of the N+1 problem. "1" refers to the call to fetch the top-level tracks and "N" is the number of subsequent calls to fetch the author subfield for each track.

{
  tracks {
    # 1
    title
    author {
      # N calls for N tracks
      name
    }
  }
}
What makes the N + 1 problem inefficient?

Additionally, in the context of our app and this specific , we're not expecting the homepage to change very frequently. Maybe a new track is added every few weeks. It would be nice to make use of a cache to avoid unnecessary calls to our REST API. Conveniently, our REST API already sets cache headers for its endpoints.

With , one is often composed of a mix of different and types, coming from different endpoints, with different cache policies. So how should we deal with caching in this context?

Hand-drawn illustration depicting the N + 1 problem with a query and a REST API

We're starting to really feel the limits of our simple fetch approach.

To solve these problems, we need something specifically designed for , that will efficiently handle resource caching and deduplication for our REST API calls.

And because it's a very common task to fetch data from REST when building a API, Apollo provides a DataSource class for just that: the RESTDataSource.

By implementing a RESTDataSource on your server, all of the challenges we just saw are taken care of out of the box.

How might a resource cache be useful for our data source?

Let's look at how to extend and implement this RESTDataSource in our Catstronauts app.

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