Apollo Federation on the JVM

Packages published to Maven Central; release notes in RELEASE_NOTES.md. Note that older versions of this package may only be available in JCenter, but we are planning to republish these versions to Maven Central.

An example of graphql-spring-boot microservice is available in spring-example.

Getting started

Dependency management with Gradle

Make sure Maven Central is among your repositories:

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

Add a dependency to graphql-java-support:

dependencies {
    implementation 'com.apollographql.federation:federation-graphql-java-support:0.6.3'
}

graphql-java schema transformation

graphql-java-support produces a graphql.schema.GraphQLSchema by transforming your existing schema in accordance to the federation specification. It follows the Builder pattern.

Start with com.apollographql.federation.graphqljava.Federation.transform(…), which can receive either:

• A GraphQLSchema;
• A TypeDefinitionRegistry, optionally with a RuntimeWiring;
• A String, Reader, or File declaring the schema using the Schema Definition Language, optionally with a RuntimeWiring;

and returns a SchemaTransformer.

If your schema does not contain any types annotated with the @key directive, nothing else is required. You can build a transformed GraphQLSchema with SchemaTransformer#build(), and confirm it exposes query { _schema { sdl } }.

Otherwise, all types annotated with @key will be part of the _Entity union type, and reachable through query { _entities(representations: [Any!]!) { … } }. Before calling SchemaTransformer#build(), you will also need to provide:

• A TypeResolver for _Entity using SchemaTransformer#resolveEntityType(TypeResolver);
• A DataFetcher or DataFetcherFactory for _entities using SchemaTransformer#fetchEntities(DataFetcher|DataFetcherFactory).

A minimal but complete example is available in InventorySchemaProvider.

Federated tracing

To make your server generate performance traces and return them along with responses to the Apollo Gateway (which then can send them to Apollo Graph Manager), install the FederatedTracingInstrumentation into your GraphQL object:

GraphQL graphql = GraphQL.newGraphQL(graphQLSchema)
  .instrumentation(new FederatedTracingInstrumentation())
  .build()

It is generally desired to only create traces for requests that actually come from Apollo Gateway, as they aren't helpful if you're connecting directly to your backend service for testing. In order for FederatedTracingInstrumentation to know if the request is coming from Gateway, you need to give it access to the HTTP request's headers, by making the context part of your ExecutionInput implement the HTTPRequestHeaders interface. For example:

HTTPRequestHeaders context = new HTTPRequestHeaders() {
    @Override
    public @Nullable String getHTTPRequestHeader(String caseInsensitiveHeaderName) {
        return myIncomingHTTPRequest.getHeader(caseInsensitiveHeaderName);
    }
};
graphql.execute(ExecutionInput.newExecutionInput(queryString).context(context));