How we define types - where we draw boundaries around the categories of things we're working with - depends on how we want to use the data. When we need to represent a new kind of fruit, the type gives us a standard way to organize a fruit's fields and corresponding values so that we can access and use them. In GraphQL, this Fruit type is considered an Object Type. With 'Fruit' as our type, we can see how its 'price' could exist as one of its fields. As a type of thing in general, fruit could have many - perhaps infinite! - properties for us to learn about, but here we're asking for just one: the cost of the fruit, or its price. It's the subject that we want specific information for. In this example, we can imagine the type of thing we're asking about as the 'fruit'. Let's use our fruit question from earlier to see these pieces at work.

This lets us get really detailed with our request: we can ask for lots of things, or just one. Types let us define what we want information about, and fields let us specify the individual properties on the type that we might ask about at some point. We use a system of types and fields to organize and write our GraphQL queries. We can start to grasp how it accomplishes this by inspecting the core pieces at play in GraphQL: types and fields. Likewise, when we write and run a GraphQL query, we're sending a specific request for some kind of data! But what's even more powerful about GraphQL is the way it allows us to write fewer, more precise requests to get all the data we need in one go. For instance, When communicating with a GraphQL service, we use GraphQL! When working directly with a backend database, we might use something like SQL (Structured Query Language). The query language we use in a given situation depends on the resource we need to get data from. In the case of GraphQL, we can make fewer requests while receiving more data.

These keywords have specific meaning assigned to them within the query language, so they give the system that provides the data clear instructions about what to do, what to grab, or what to delete!ĭifferent query languages have different strengths they often solve a particular problem. Many times a language's syntax involves keywords like SELECT or mutation. Sometimes we need to include certain characters, spacing, or words. For this reason, query languages have their own syntax, or way of writing requests. When we ask for data, we need to be really precise and follow specific rules so that the system understands what we're looking for. Query languages exist to help us ask a system or service for something in particular.

Graphql query to json online