Reusing Imported GraphQL Type Definitions in Absinthe

Questions / Help
, ,
1

I’m trying to break apart my schema types into reusable definitions. I’d like to define, say, an Office in one place and use that in a UserTypes definition and CreatedThingsTypes definition i.e:

defmodule DerpWeb.Schema do
  use Absinthe.Schema

  import_types DerpWeb.Schema.UserTypes
  import_types DerpWeb.Schema.OfficeTypes
  import_types DerpWeb.Schema.CreatedThingTypes
  ...
end

and

defmodule DerpWeb.Schema.CreatedThingTypes do
  use Absinthe.Schema.Notation

  import DerpWeb.Schema.UserTypes
  import DerpWeb.Schema.OfficeTypes
  ...
  object :created_thing do
    @desc "The user associated with the created thing"
    field :user, :user, resolve: assoc(:user)
    @desc "The office associated with the created thing"
    field :office, :office, resolve: assoc(:office)
    ...
  end
end

When I try to compile this, I get stuff like:

/Users/tres/derp/lib/derp_web/schema.ex:5: Absinthe type identifier :office is not unique.

  References to types must be unique.

  > All types within a GraphQL schema must have unique names. No two provided
  > types may have the same name. No provided type may have a name which
  > conflicts with any built in types (including Scalar and Introspection
  > types).

  Reference: https://github.com/facebook/graphql/blob/master/spec/Section%203%20--%20Type%20System.md#type-system

If I don’t import_types from the types definition file, then I get an undefined type reference error:

  Office :office is not defined in your schema.

Am I missing something here, or is it just expected that we’ll be defining the entirety of the imported object in a single file, no matter whether that’s the top-level schema or an imported type definition file?

Thanks so much for your time and any help you can give!

2

Hey @tres. import_types should generally only be used from the root level Schema. The Schema is ultimately a single namespace, and no checking of types is done until the schema itself is built. In other words just do:

defmodule DerpWeb.Schema do
  use Absinthe.Schema

  import_types DerpWeb.Schema.UserTypes
  import_types DerpWeb.Schema.OfficeTypes
  import_types DerpWeb.Schema.CreatedThingTypes
  ...
end

defmodule DerpWeb.Schema.CreatedThingTypes do
  use Absinthe.Schema.Notation
  ...
  object :created_thing do
    @desc "The user associated with the created thing"
    field :user, :user, resolve: assoc(:user)
    @desc "The office associated with the created thing"
    field :office, :office, resolve: assoc(:office)
    ...
  end
end

And it’ll all just work.

5 Likes
3

Awesome.

Thanks, Ben!

1 Like