Best practices for sharing a schema between server and client

[kaysond]

I'm developing an app that uses type-graphql + apollo server on the backend, and the apollo client + react for the frontend. Right now I have my repo split into 3 packages: client, server, and schema.

Server imports the schema, creates the resolver for it, and then does a buildSchema() for the ApolloServer.

On the client side, I import just the schema as types, and pass them as the generic type to ApolloClient.useQuery<Type>().

This generally seems to work well. Is there a different or better way to do things?

One big problem I've noticed (though maybe its more specific to Apollo than sharing the schema), is that the type returned from useQuery is ignorant of the actual query itself. So if my type/schema is

@ObjectType()
class Recipe {
  @Field(type => ID)
  id: string;

  @Field()
  title: string;

  @Field({ nullable: true })
  description?: string;

  @Field()
  creationDate: Date;

  @Field(type => [String])
  ingredients: string[];
}

and my query is

query GetRecipeTitle {
  recipe {
    id
    title
  }
}

The returned data object from useQuery() only actually has the id and title properties, but because the schema type has description creationDate and ingredients as well, typescript things that those exist on data even though they don't. Is there any way to address this?

[MichalLytek]

TypeGraphQL produces standard GraphQL schema. You can you all the tools for GraphQL for frontend to have typesafe queries, like graphql code generator.

[kaysond]

Can you elaborate? Do you mean run buildSchema with emitSchemaFile then run something like graphql code generator with a script or at build time?

Right now, I have my type/schema in the schema package, and the server package imports that and creates the resolver for it which is then passed to buildSchema for the Apollo.server. How can I generate the schema file just from the types? (and not a resolver?) Otherwise my client has to depend on the server just for the graphql file, but I want all the graphql schema information in the schema package.

Alternatively, is there a way I can add the resolver definitions to the schema package, but leave the actual implementation to the server package?

[MichalLytek]

buildSchema with emitSchemaFile generates SDL. Then you can use any graphql tool that uses SDL - the same as for apollo, etc. No special TypeGraphQL treatment needed.