Is it possible to do GraphQL Schema Stitching with Absinthe

Not yet!

This is the primary feature aimed at with Absinthe 1.5. I can’t give you a timeline yet, but we believe we have a high level approach that will work, and it’s largely a matter of carving out the time to make it happen.

Cool, I’m glad that it’s on the radar. Is the plan for 1.5 to have “full” stitching (i.e. links as described by that article)? Or will 1.5 just have basic stitching. For the initial version of our API we only really need basic stitching, so it would be nice to play with that before “full” stitching is ready.

For reference here is the matching issue with discussion in the Absinthe project:
https://github.com/absinthe-graphql/absinthe/issues/387

I think the plan is to do full linking, there isn’t gonna be much of an incremental change there I think. The largest amount of work here involves refactoring the internal mechanics of schema building, and adding GraphQL client capabilities. Once those capabilities are in place that full feature set should fall out pretty easily. Or at least that’s the plan

Is the implication here that there will also be GraphQL client capability in the API in Absinthe 1.5, or will it only be used internally to support the schema-stitching?

@GregMefford this is a good question. The answer is honestly TBD at this point. I can say that in order to make sure that Absinthe 1.5 doesn’t take forever to come out, we’ll likely target the minimum functionality we need to do schema stitching. However if this functionality can be exposed via publicly documented functions we will absolutely do so.

My vote would definitely be to focus on the schema-stitching feature!

I was going to say “it would be nice to have GQL client support if it’s easy”, but on second though, we all know that extending the API is never easy because it’s more surface area that you need to support. Maybe save it for 1.6.

Yeah exactly. I fully expect to have some internal functions that may be useful to folks, but we’ll likely keep them undocumented so that when we do 1.6 or whatever we can think through the client story in more specific detail. Schema stitching is ambitious enough without also trying to nail down a client API.

Is there any recommended approach for super basic schema stitching before 1.5 is out? I’m thinking something along the lines of creating a controller (although code could live somewhere else) that just takes a graphql query, splits it based on top-level keys and sends it to separate GraphQL backends and then merges them back together.

This is the basic foundation of what we need so that we don’t need to expose multiple GraqhQL endpoints to our end-clients. These are all internal GraphQL api’s that we are in the process of building, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to keep them “compatible” in terms of authentication and other concerns.

Hi @benwilson512 and thank you for everything you’re doing!

I was wondering if schema stitching was still on Absinthe’s roadmap? I’m currently building a small distributed app and this would be a very useful way to manage collaboration of microservices behind GraphQL API.

Cheers!