GraphQLize Update (#4) - Aggregate Functions & Group By.

Author, GraphQLize

Hello World,

The fourth sprint of GraphQLize went according to the plan (fourth time in a row!), and the queries in GraphQLize has got an uplift through the aggregate functions and group-by support :).

Let's take a short tour of these new features.

Aggregate Functions

GraphQLize supports the standard aggregate functions count, max, min, sum & avg. We can also use the GROUP-BY operation along with these aggregate functions.

query {
courses {
countOfRating
avgOfRating
maxOfRating
minOfRating
sumOfRating
}
}

The aggregate functions over columns are available as fields in the corresponding type representing the table.

type Course {
# ...
rating: Int!
# ... aggregate functions as fields
avgOfRating: BigDecimal
countOfRating: Int!
maxOfRating: Int
minOfRating: Int
sumOfRating: Int
# ...
}

Naming Convention

As seen in the above example, GraphQLize uses the name of the aggregate function (in camel case) along with the preposition Of as prefix to represent the aggregate functions as fields.

Column Name Aggregate Function Field
first_name count countOfFirstName
payment sum sumOfPayment

Aggregates Over Relationships

We can use the aggregate functions over the relationship fields as well.

Let's assume that we have a schema like below

We can get the total courses count and the average course rating of all the authors along with their first-name and last-name, using the following GraphQL query

query {
authors {
id
firstName
courses {
countOfId
avgOfRating
}
}
}
note

The countOfId field translates to count(id) in the SQL's select clause. The count of all rows via count(*) will be added in a future release.

GROUP BY

The aggregate functions often paired along with the GROUP BY operation and GraphQLize supports it out of the box!

For the above schema, we can group the courses by their rating and get their count using the following query

query {
courses(groupBy: [rating]) {
rating
countOfRating
}
}

What's Next?

All my spare time went on building GraphQLize for the six-plus months, and I also successfully delivered a client project at work during this time!

I keep getting the burnout feelings and the two-three days breaks not working out. Hence I decided to stay away from doing programming outside my work for the next three weeks (til June 10,2020).

I am committed to making this library production-ready, and I believe this break will enable me to get my focus and energy back on track!

I haven't planned the next iteration of GraphQLize yet. Most likely I will be working on supporting aggregate functions in the query filters and adding the having clause to filter group by values.

You can keep track of the progress by

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Cheers,
Tamizh