2020-06-12
1727
#graphql
Charly Poly
20062
Jun 12, 2020 ⋅ 6 min read

What you need to know about GraphQL enums

Charly Poly Senior Software Engineer at Double, former Tech Lead at Algolia. I'm passionate about web software engineering, from frontend development to working on APIs, mostly on TypeScript, GraphQL, and Ruby ecosystems.

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4 Replies to "What you need to know about GraphQL enums"

  1. Great write-up, thank you!

    I have a question though: It isn’t clear to me how the client side can know the internal values for the enum. Since Apollo has devs define those internal values in a resolver, they don’t show up in the server schema itself, and therefore when you tell codegen to run for the client, it can’t know about the internal values. Am I missing some helpful setting or something? Do you have a complete version of your example in a repo?

  2. Hi Micah,

    Thank you for you comment!

    Although I’m not an expert of Apollo Server inner working, I do believe that Apollo Server is using enums “internal values” passed as resolvers to build the schema and pass them as default value to graphql-js (https://github.com/graphql/graphql-js/issues/1604)

    Since those enum internal values are passed to the Schema definition “magically” by Apollo Server, it explains how you end-up having them in the introspection query results used by tools like GraphQL code generator.

    Please let me know if it answers your question!

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