Recursion inside of schema's

[Jacrispys]

Title says most of it, I am creating a client API and have found recursion inside this type:
(Also component has componentInstance object inside it, so two instances of recursion)

When I run the program with a query that uses components, I get this error

Not sure how to avoid this?

[t1]

Let's look at the server side, first; and if we use a friends field, the problem with field recursion becomes more apparent: if Harry is a friend of Hermione, and Hermione is a friend of Harry, you could "lie" and not return Hermione as a friend of Harry when Hermione was already returned before. This could make life for a client quite hard, as they would have to reconstruct the data. If friendship can also be single-sided, actual data would be missing, we wouldn't know if Harris is also a friend of Hermione. A proper solution would require a means to reference another entity in the JSON result. While it would be possible to do by using, e.g., the id field, it would mean that all the other fields would have to be nullable. So all of this is not supported by GraphQL on the server; instead, the client has to repeat the request as deep as they want the data to be returned. In other tech stacks, you would use Fragments to make repeating the request easier. But this is not necessary (and not yet supported) in our typesafe client. We'd have to introduce a different way to specify the maximum depth.

But however you specify the request, you would get several copies of the same entity, i.e. you would have two instances of Hermione in memory. This will give you headaches when you want to change the data and send it back. All of this is extremely ugly, and basically JSONs fault, as it doesn't support a reference mechanist, which, e.g., YAML does.

When we had this problem in a project, we chose a different solution: we return a list of people where the first entry is the root entry; and the friends field is just the list of the friends' indexes in the result list. This is extra work on the client as well as on the server.

I think this issue will have to be discussed further in the GraphQL community.

[Jacrispys]

Well since it is a json object... how do I know which "JsonObject" class to use... since I've already tried a couple that didn't work, it's very confusing that Jakarta json seems to be native, but also org.json, but also micro profiles seems to have jsonobject classes???

How do I know what to use for this scalar?

Also if it's not implemented yet... can I just not access these variables? Because that hurts my project a lot...

[t1]

No, it's not implemented, yet, and we'd have to decide about what json classes we'd support.

If you don't need the data field of your image class, just remove it! In fact, you should remove all fields that you don't need, not only because of the bloat in the payload, it could also be expensive for the server to fetch the data and/or count against your usage/complexity threshold.

[Jacrispys]

Well, I would do that but I do need the json data, I'm currently making a wrapper for this schema because it's currently only supported in ts/J's

[Jacrispys]

@t1 do you want me to pull this to a issue to implement Json scalars? (Maybe even write a PR for it)

[t1]

It has nothing to do with what this thread originally started with 🤪, but: Yeah, that would be really cool!
I won't be able to find the time to implement this myself, but I may be able to support you if you have questions about the code.