Hello!

What’s the recommended best practice for dealing with the situation where the graphql object you want to return requires data that is spread over multiple DB tables and therefore schemas?

One option is just to get all the data I need from an ecto query, create a custom map and return that. However I found that sometimes returning structs and other times returning maps from my context methods makes downstream logic a little more cumbersome. For example I have the following absinthe object:

  object :block do
    field(:public_id, non_null(:string), name: "id")
    field(:content, non_null(:json))

    field :author, :user do
      resolve(&ScribeWeb.Resolvers.Accounts.get_user/3)
    end
  end

The get_user resolver then pattern matches on the parent fields. If the parent had a user_id than I will fetch that user, otherwise I will fetch the user in the resolution context:

  def get_user(%_{user_id: id}, _args, %{context: %{current_user: user}}) do
    if user.id == id do
      {:ok, user}
    else
      {:ok, Accounts.get_user(id)}
    end
  end

This pattern matches on a struct of any kind, but if I start returning maps than I need to account for that too by creating another function.

The other way I was thinking was to add an embedded schema and that I can use instead of a plain map. I don’t have any particular need for casting or validating this data though so it kind of feels like I’m using a struct for no real reason.

How has everyone else dealt with this?