I have been using Apollo Server + Prisma. I was wondering if there is a better way of doing the following. —— Gist: how can I cleanly

{include: true}

a relation in prisma only when that field is asked in GraphQL query? Say I have a Book table and an Author table. Book and Author are related. I have a GQL Query

books {
  name
  author {
    name
  }
}

This resolves with

const books = await prisma.book.findMany({include: {author: true}})

. What if I did not ask for the author? Although Graphql wont send it to client, I would like to avoid that unnecessary join on orm level. I can use the info param of resolver function to see if that field was asked and conditionally use include in prisma but that is not scalable and kills the dx. I thought if resolver chains could help. But am not sure how to go about it. Any help is much appreciated. Thank you!

A solution is to use a Resolver Chain to resolve the

author

separately from the book.

const resolvers = {
  Query: {
    books() { return prisma.book.findMany() 
  }
  Book: {
    author(parent, args, context, info) {
      return prisma.authors.findOne({ id: parent.author_id})
    }
  }
}

Thanks for the quick reply Jared! I will give resolver chains a go. :)

Yes, that is the case. Also read https://www.prisma.io/docs/guides/performance-and-optimization/query-optimization-performance

Yes. I see two queries there. Thank you!

So to summarize, it all depends on your use-case and how your API is accessed. resolving both in the 1 prisma query will overall be faster if fetching all that data but that will not be efficient as your models and relations grow. using the dataloader pattern and resolver chain is more appropriate if you don't control the clients integrating with the API. there is a third option where you can parse the graphql tree to understand what they are querying for (I don't recommend this option as it's complex, especially with graphql field aliases)

Thank you so much!

Anbother option is to use @Ahmed’s

PrismaSelect

for this 🙌 https://paljs.com/plugins/select/

This is it! Thank youu for going the extra mile. Developers make great communities!

Awesome! that's option 3 been done for you!