Execution Context

Execution Context means the context of the execution of GraphQL Operation. It’s related to Dependency Injection, especially Singletons and represents the context object created by your GraphQL server.

Why “especially useful in Singletons”?

As you know from “Introduction to Dependency Injection” chapter, Singletons can’t directly access Operation scoped services, meaning they probably can’t also directly access the context object created per each operation. Directly.

Thanks to @ExecutionContext decorator, every Singleton provider gets access to the GraphQL Context and the Operation scoped Injector.

Take a look at the example below:

import { Injectable, ExecutionContext } from 'graphql-modules'
import { Config } from './config'
 
@Injectable()
export class Data {
  constructor(private config: Config) {}
 
  @ExecutionContext()
  private context: ExecutionContext
 
  someMethod() {
    console.log('Environment', this.config.env)
 
    const value = this.context.injector.get(SOME_TOKEN)
  }
}

The Config token requested in the constructor is a Singleton.

The next lines show the usage of @ExecutionContext decorator. It’s a property decorator that tells GraphQL Modules to put there the GraphQL Context with Injector.

This way the Singleton Data service runs within the execution context of a GraphQL Operation and can access Operation scoped Injector and the GraphQL Context object.

It also means you gain a lot in terms of performance because the Data class is instantiated only once and used in many operations.