Pagination and Sorting Support

[rstoyanchev]

Investigate ways to support Pagination, for example connecting to pagination support in Spring Data repositories. There is also a specification as well. There are a different ways to control navigation, typically offset or cursor based. Spring Data currently supports offset based pagination.

Pagination depends on a predictable sort order. There doesn't seem to be any spec or ongoing effort to converge on a common approach. There is a talk on the topic that provides a good overview.

• Auto-generate Connection, PageInfo, and Edge schema type definitions #619
• Support pagination return values and pagination requests in @SchemaMapping methods #620
• Pagination Support with Querydsl and Query By Example #597
• Update SchemaMappingInspector to support Connection types #656

[Diluka]

this is an example https://doug-martin.github.io/nestjs-query/docs/graphql/paging

cursor based and offset based paginations are compatible. just add offset to args and totalCount to result in cursor based pagination

[SeriousSamV]

I'm trying to implement this, but just wanted to check before. When is this feature going to come out if ever?

[bclozel]

@SeriousSamV I don't think this is an easy issue to tackle and we probably need to spend some time designing and iterating on that problem. This issue is not scheduled yet so we don't have a concrete plan for it. Voting for this issue and sharing useful information about use cases (see previous comments) is a way to help us make progress on this.

[yangchoo]

Thanks again for the fantastic work on this project, it has greatly simplified the integration of graphql-java into an existing SpringBoot project.

I don't see much movement on this issue and it doesn't look like it'll be tackled as part of RC1 so I figured I'll give it a push. Pagination support is a pretty common requirement for APIs.

In terms of use-cases, we are in the process of transitioning some GET endpoints from REST to GraphQL. Previously, these endpoints return a org.springframework.data.domain.Page object, while consuming a Pageable query parameter. This is a relatively common approach for implementing paging support.

As part of the initial transition, we are utilizing an offset-based approach supported by our client. This was straightforward to implement by exposing offset/limit query arguments and creating a Pageable object from these arguments. This object can then be directly passed into a Repository.findAll method.

Ideally though, a cursor-based implementation such the relay cursor connections specification should be chosen. Besides relay, there seems to be a shift towards clients supporting that specification as a standard (e.g. see apollo).

If the full relay connections specification looks too daunting, perhaps simpler offset/cursor-based pagination implementations can be first supported? It'll be nice to rely on an official implementation vs. hand-rolling our own.

Hopefully some of this context helps. Happy to provide more if its useful. Thanks!

[saintcoder]

Is there any "temporary" of implementing pagination while this issue is addressed?

[agtraveso]

Hi! Is there any update of this issue?

We were using https://github.com/graphql-java-kickstart/graphql-spring-boot in some of our projects. It already provides pagination using relay classes -> https://www.graphql-java-kickstart.com/tools/relay. These relay classes are already defined in com.graphql-java library, so would be available in this project too. It's not necessary to reinvent the wheel :)

Probably the first step to support relay/pagination is to recognize relay directives in the schema.graphqls dinamically, generating the necessary classes.

[Michal-Kucera]

Hello, I'd like to share my workaround for Pagination and Sorting Support for Spring GraphQL, using Kotlin, although it doesn't work with cursors (as per spring-projects/spring-data-commons#2151).

https://gist.github.com/Michal-Kucera/a0ad1572a0c212dc8b67b8136c7cb78c

P.S. I didn't try it out with nested schemas..

Once Spring data common supports cursors, we may reuse classes from graphql-java, relay package, i.e.:

• graphql.relay.Connection
• graphql.relay.Edge
• graphql.relay.PageInfo
• graphql.relay.ConnectionCursor

There is also an interesting class graphql.relay.Relay, which might be worth investigating further.

Cheers!
Michal