Introducing: GraphQL Codegen plugin for TypeScript & SWR!

Yuta HagaMonday, Nov 23rd 2020

graphql codegen typescript react hooks swr

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The other day I was wondering which GraphQL client library to use for my personal project.

Apollo-Client is a powerful GraphQL client, but many of its features don't fit my use-case very well, making it a useless treasure.

So I tried combining graphql-request (opens in a new tab) with SWR (opens in a new tab) (React Hooks library for data fetching), and the bundle size was about 1/3 of the Apollo-Client combined with these two libraries, and I had the best experience of using the advanced features of SWR!

One thing was still missing: it's hard to manually write a SWR fetcher every time...

Introduction

Based on the above experience, I have created a GraphQL Code Generator (opens in a new tab) plugin called graphql-codegen-plugin-typescript-swr (opens in a new tab) that facilitates the combination of graphql-request and SWR, and published it to NPM!

Seeing is believing, so let's first look at an example of the code generated by this plugin:

export function getSdkWithHooks(
  client: GraphQLClient,
  withWrapper: SdkFunctionWrapper = defaultWrapper
) {
  const sdk = getSdk(client, withWrapper)
  return {
    ...sdk,
    useGetPost(
      key: SWRKeyInterface,
      variables: GetPostQueryVariables,
      config?: SWRConfigInterface<GetPostQuery>
    ) {
      return useSWR<GetPostQuery>(key, () => sdk.GetPost(variables), config)
    }
  }
}

The code above is using the SWR plugin, in combination with typescript-graphql-request plugin.

This way, a wrapper function is generated for each GraphQL operation (query/mutation/subscription). The generated function uses the base code from the typescript-graphql-request plugin, and it uses useSWR to execute the actual request, so the user can get the same result as useSWR by simply entering the query key, variables, and options in the component!

const sdk = getSdkWithHooks(new GraphQLClient(API_URL, options))
 
const PostPage = ({ slug }) => {
  const { data, mutate, error } = sdk.useGetPost(
    `blog/post/${slug}`,
    { slug },
    { refreshInterval: 60 }
  )
  return <Post post={data.post} />
}

Usage

To get started, start by installing graphql-codegen-plugin-typescript-swr in addition to the @graphql-codegen packages:

npm i -D @graphql-codegen/cli @graphql-codegen/typescript @graphql-codegen/typescript-operations @graphql-codegen/typescript-graphql-request graphql-codegen-plugin-typescript-swr

Then configure codegen.yml:

overwrite: true
generates:
  sdk.ts:
    schema: '${MY_GRAPH_API_ENDPOINT_URL}'
    documents: './api/my-graph-api/**/*.graphql'
    plugins:
      - typescript
      - typescript-operations
      - typescript-graphql-request
      - plugin-typescript-swr
config:
  # If you have a query that you want to use `useSWRInfinite`, list it in Options
  useSWRInfinite:
    - GetPost
  scalars:
    DateTime: string
    JSON: unknown
    Upload: unknown
    Time: string
    Date: string
    Long: number