Build a GraphQL Server
Write a GraphQL Mutation
In order to change the data that we can query for in a GraphQL Schema, we have to define what is called a mutation in GraphQL. Mutations allow us to specify ways to create, update, and delete data. It also provides a way to fetch information after the mutation occurs. In this video, we’ll learn how to create a Mutation Type in GraphQL and specify the information we want returned.
[00:00] We have a GraphQL schema that's exposing a single query type. If we go into graphical to check out the type definitions we can see that the query type exposes two fields, videos and video.
[00:15] Videos, in this case, is just a GraphQL list and it's a GraphQL list of a type called video. Video in this case just has four fields. One is the ID. There's also the title, duration, and whether or not this video was released on Egghead.
[00:34] All this information is great for querying information on our videos, but what if we actually want to go and create new videos to put on our platform? In this case, we would use something called a mutation in GraphQL, so let's go and write one for adding a video to our GraphQL schema.
[00:53] Let's switch on over to our editor of choice and start writing our first mutation. Mutations in GraphQL are just GraphQL object types, so we can create our new root mutation by doing new GraphQL object type. I'm giving it a name of mutation and then the description can be the root mutation type.
[01:17] Next up we'll add a fields object and then inside of that object we'll specify a field called createVideo, which is going to be responsible for creating videos in our GraphQL schema.
[01:30] Each field in a GraphQL mutation also has a type. In this case we're going to have a video type. This is going to correspond to what we're going to be able to query on after we run the mutation.
[01:43] We're also going to need some arguments to help us actually construct our new video. In this case we're just going to specify title for the title of the video, duration for the duration of the video, and finally, release, which will tell us whether or not the video is released to the public.
[02:03] The last part for this mutation is to add in a resolve handler. This has the same signature as those resolve statements from querying, but in this case arguments are going to correspond to the arguments that we created before.
[02:18] The goal of this resolver statement now is to go and take in all of the arguments that are being passed in with this args variable and create our video. Thankfully, I have a method already for that inside of our source/data/index.js file and here there's a method called createVideo.
[02:37] This method takes in a title and duration and released fields for our video, creates a new video with a brand-new ID, pushes it to our end memory array, and then just returns the video. At the end of the file I'm just exporting that method.
[02:54] With this method in hand, we can go back into our index.js file now and import it at the top. I'll just do createVideo here, and now let's go back to our mutation, specifically this resolver. What we can do is just return, createVideo, and then pass in the arguments.
[03:13] CreateVideo takes in an object and the object has the fields title, duration, and release and thankfully that matches up with arcs here, so we'll just pass that in to create our video.
[03:27] Now we've actually created our first mutation type and I'll actually rename our variable here to mutationType just to indicate that. In order to add it to our schema all we need to do is pass it into the mutation field, so mutation and then mutation field.
[03:43] We can verify that this is working by switching into our terminal and rerunning our server by running node index.js. When we switch into graphical and reload the page, we see that there's now a new mutation type available to us inside of our schema.
[04:02] To verify that this mutation actually works for creating new videos, let's go and see what videos currently exist. We'll do videos and then title. We can see that there's a video on creating a GraphQL schema as well as a video on Ember JS CLI.
[04:19] To create our mutation we'll do mutation and we'll give it some kind of name. In this case the name's just going to be m. We'll do createVideo and createVideo takes in a title, which we will say is fu, a duration, which is an integer and we'll say 300.
[04:37] Then finally it takes in a Boolean for a release and we're going to say it's false. Inside of this we actually can query for fields on that resulting video. We'll grab the ID and also the title. Then we'll run our mutation.
[04:55] In the response we can see that we have a new video being created with a given ID and title. We can go and verify that this is added to our list of videos by running our videos query one more time. We'll just get all the titles, one more query, and there we go. Our video was added to our list of videos.