Is there a reasonable way to implement a job-based query paradigm in GraphQL?
In particular, something like the following:
Caller submits a search request
Backend returns a job ID
Caller receives status updates on the job as it runs
Caller separately can retrieve pages of data from the job results
I guess the problem I see here is that we are splitting up the process into two steps: One is making the request and the second is retrieving data. As a result, the fields requested in the first request do not correspond with what is returned (just a job ID). And similarly, a call to retrieve results has the same issue.
Subscriptions don't really solve this problem either, I don't believe. They might help with requesting data that might take a long time to return I think, but that isn't quite the same as a job-based API.
Maybe this is a niche use case, and I have no doubt that it wasn't what GraphQL was initially built to solve. But, I'm just wondering if this is something doable, or if this is more of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Related
I'm making a search agreggator and I've been wondering how could I improve the performance of the search.
Given that I'm getting results from different websites, currently I need to wait to receive the results for each provider but this is done one after another so the whole request takes a while to respond.
The easiest solution would be to just make a request from the client for each provider, but this would end up with a ton of request per search, (but if this is the proper way I'll just do it.)
Why I've been wondering is if there's way to return results everytime a provider responds, so if we have providers A, B and C and B already returned results then send it back to the client. In order for this to work all the searchs would need to run in parallel of course.
Do you know a way of doing this?
I'm trying to build a search experience similar to SkyScanner, that loads results but then you can see it still keeps getting more records and it sorts them on the fly (on client side as far as I can see).
Caching is the key here. Best practices for external API (or scraping) is to be as little of a 'taker' as possible. So in your Laravel setup, get your results, but cache the results for as long as makes sense for your app. Although the odds in a skyscanner situation is low that two users will make the exact same request, the odds are much higher that a user will make the same request multiple times, or may share the link, etc.
https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/cache
cache(['key' => 'value'], now()->addMinutes(10));
$value = cache('key');
To actually scrape the content, you could use this:
https://github.com/softonic/laravel-intelligent-scraper
Or to use an API which is the nicer route:
https://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/stable/
On the client side, you could just make a few calls to your own service in separate requests and that would give you your asynchronous feel you're looking for.
I'm trying to implement a batch query interface with GraphQL. I can get a request to work synchronously without issue, but I'm not sure how to approach making the result asynchronous. Basically, I want to be able to kick off the query and return a pointer of sorts to where the results will eventually be when the query is done. I'd like to do this because the queries can sometimes take quite a while.
In REST, this is trivial. You return a 202 and return a Location header pointing to where the client can go to fetch the result. GraphQL as a specification does not seem to have this notion; it appears to always want requests to be handled synchronously.
Is there any convention for doing things like this in GraphQL? I very much like the query specification but I'd prefer to not leave the client HTTP connection open for up to a few minutes while a large query is executed on the backend. If anything happens to kill that connection the entire query would need to be retried, even if the results themselves are durable.
What you're trying to do is not solved easily in a spec-compliant way. Apollo introduced the idea of a #defer directive that does pretty much what you're looking for but it's still an experimental feature. I believe Relay Modern is trying to do something similar.
The idea is effectively the same -- the client uses a directive to mark a field or fragment as deferrable. The server resolves the request but leaves the deferred field null. It then sends one or more patches to the client with the deferred data. The client is able to apply the initial request and the patches separately to its cache, triggering the appropriate UI changes each time as usual.
I was working on a similar issue recently. My use case was to submit a job to create a report and provide the result back to the user. Creating a report takes couple of minutes which makes it an asynchronous operation. I created a mutation which submitted the job to the backend processing system and returned a job ID. Then I periodically poll the jobs field using a query to find out about the state of the job and eventually the results. As the result is a file, I return a link to a different endpoint where it can be downloaded (similar approach Github uses).
Polling for actual results is working as expected but I guess this might be better solved by subscriptions.
I have a project built using CQRS, but I can't figure out how to implement one use case.
The user needs to be able to make a Query which will return a set of data for them to view. However, I also need to save the data they got at the same time.
Is there a way to do this within a Query without violating CQRS' principles? Or would the Query and Command need to be two separate API calls one after another?
In CQRS it is your client who can do both command and queries. This client is not necessary a piece of UI.
It can be an API endpoint handler, which would
receive a query
forward it to the query endpoint
wait for the answer
send an answer to the caller
send a command to store the answer
Is there a way to do this within a Query without violating CQRS' principles?
It depends.
If "save the data" means "make some change to the domain model"... well, that would be pretty weird.
Asking a question should not change the answer. -- Bertrand Meyer
On the other hand, logging/telemetry are pretty normal ways to track the activity of an application, so that should be fine.
There are some realities of a distributed system on an unreliable network that you need to be aware of (what should the behavior be if the telemetry system is not available? What are the consequences of recording queries that don't actually reach the client (because the network is unreliable).
As #VoiceOfUnreason stated, it may be somewhat strange to effect domain changes when querying data.
However, it may be that you could swop that around.
For instance, perhaps one could query a forecast of sorts. We would want to store that forecast. It then seems as though the query results in us having to save the result. This appears to break CQS at some level since each query would result in a change of state.
If we swop that around and first request a forecast via the domain handling and then that produces a result, or even a pointer to the result, then the query would be something you could perform on the data multiple times without "breaking" CQS.
So, I'm working on a CQRS/ES project in which we are having some doubts about how to handle trivial problems that would be easy to handle in other architectures
My scenario is the following:
I have a customer CRUD REST API and each customer has unique document(number), so when I'm registering a new customer I have to verify if there is another customer with that document to avoid duplicity, but when it comes to a CQRS/ES architecture where we have eventual consistency, I found out that this kind of validations can be very hard to address.
It is important to notice that my problem is not across microservices, but between the command application and the query application of the same microservice.
Also we are using eventstore.
My current solution:
So what I do today is, in my command application, before saving the CustomerCreated event, I ask the query application (using PostgreSQL) if there is a customer with that document, and if not, I allow the event to go on. But that doesn't guarantee 100%, right? Because my query can be desynchronized, so I cannot trust it 100%. That's when my second validation kicks in, when my query application is processing the events and saving them to my PostgreSQL, I check again if there is a customer with that document and if there is, I reject that event and emit a compensating event to undo/cancel/inactivate the customer with the duplicated document, therefore finishing that customer stream on eventstore.
Altough this works, there are 2 things that bother me here, the first thing is my command application relying on the query application, so if my query application is down, my command is affected (today I just return false on my validation if query is down but still...) and second thing is, should a query/read model really be able to emit events? And if so, what is the correct way of doing it? Should the command have some kind of API for that? Or should the query emit the event directly to eventstore using some common shared library? And if I have more than one view/read? Which one should I choose to handle this?
Really hope someone could shine a light into these questions and help me this these matters.
For reference, you may want to be reviewing what Greg Young has written about Set Validation.
I ask the query application (using PostgreSQL) if there is a customer with that document, and if not, I allow the event to go on. But that doesn't guarantee 100%, right?
That's exactly right - your read model is stale copy, and may not have all of the information collected by the write model.
That's when my second validation kicks in, when my query application is processing the events and saving them to my PostgreSQL, I check again if there is a customer with that document and if there is, I reject that event and emit a compensating event to undo/cancel/inactivate the customer with the duplicated document, therefore finishing that customer stream on eventstore.
This spelling doesn't quite match the usual designs. The more common implementation is that, if we detect a problem when reading data, we send a command message to the write model, telling it to straighten things out.
This is commonly referred to as a process manager, but you can think of it as the automation of a human supervisor of the system. Conceptually, a process manager is an event sourced collection of messages to be sent to the command model.
You might also want to consider whether you are modeling your domain correctly. If documents are supposed to be unique, then maybe the command model should be using the document number as a key in the book of record, rather than using the customer. Or perhaps the document id should be a function of the customer data, rather than being an arbitrary input.
as far as I know, eventstore doesn't have transactions across different streams
Right - one of the things you really need to be thinking about in general is where your stream boundaries lie. If set validation has significant business value, then you really need to be thinking about getting the entire set into a single stream (or by finding a way to constrain uniqueness without using a set).
How should I send a command message to the write model? via API? via a message broker like Kafka?
That's plumbing; it doesn't really matter how you do it, so long as you are sure that the command runs within its own transaction/unit of work.
So what I do today is, in my command application, before saving the CustomerCreated event, I ask the query application (using PostgreSQL) if there is a customer with that document, and if not, I allow the event to go on. But that doesn't guarantee 100%, right? Because my query can be desynchronized, so I cannot trust it 100%.
No, you cannot safely rely on the query side, which is eventually consistent, to prevent the system to step into an invalid state.
You have two options:
You permit the system to enter in a temporary, pending state and then, eventually, you will bring it into a valid permanent state; for this you could allow the command to pass, yield CustomerRegistered event and using a Saga/Process manager you verify against a uniquely-indexed-by-document-collection and issue a compensating command (not event!), i.e. UnregisterCustomer.
Instead of sending a command, you create&start a Saga/Process that preallocates the document in a uniquely-indexed-by-document-collection and if successfully then send the RegisterCustomer command. You can model the Saga as an entity.
So, in both solution you use a Saga/Process manager. In order for the system to be resilient you should make sure that RegisterCustomer command is idempotent (so you can resend it if the Saga fails/is restarted)
You've butted up against a fairly common problem. I think the other answer by VoicOfUnreason is worth reading. I just wanted to make you aware of a few more options.
A simple approach I have used in the past is to create a lookup table. Your command tries to register the key in a unique constraint table. If it can reserve the key the command can go ahead.
Depending on the nature of the data and the domain you could let this 'problem' occur and raise additional events to mark it. If it is something that's important to the business/the way the application works then you can deal with it either manually or at the time via compensating commands. if the latter then it would make sense to use a process manager.
In some (rare) cases where speed/capacity is less of an issue then you could consider old-fashioned locking and transactions. Admittedly these are much better suited to CRUD style implementations but they can be used in CQRS/ES.
I have more detail on this in my blog post: How to Handle Set Based Consistency Validation in CQRS
I hope you find it helpful.
We are considering using GraphQL on top of a REST service (using the
FHIR standard for medical records).
I understand that the pattern with GraphQL is to aggregate the results
of multiple, independent resolvers into the final result. But a
FHIR-compliant REST server offers batch endpoints that already aggregate
data. Sometimes we’ll need à la carte data—a patient’s age or address
only, for example. But quite often, we’ll need most or all of the data
available about a particular patient.
So although we can get that kind of plenary data from a single REST call
that knits together multiple associations, it seems we will need to
fetch it piecewise to do things the GraphQL way.
An optimization could be to eager load and memoize all the associated
data anytime any resolver asks for any data. In some cases this would be
appropriate while in other cases it would be serious overkill. But
discerning when it would be overkill seems impossible given that
resolvers should be independent. Also, it seems bloody-minded to undo
and then redo something that the REST service is already perfectly
capable of doing efficiently.
So—
Is GraphQL the wrong tool when it sits on top of a REST API that can
efficiently aggregate data?
If GraphQL is the right tool in this situation, is eager-loading and
memoization of associated data appropriate?
If eager-loading and memoization is not the right solution, is there
an alternative way to take advantage of the REST service’s ability
to aggregate data?
My question is different from
this
question and
this
question because neither touches on how to take advantage of another
service’s ability to aggregate data.
An alternative approach would be to parse the request inside the resolver for a particular query. The fourth parameter passed to a resolver is an object containing extensive information about the request, including the selection set. You could then await the batched request to your API endpoint based on the requested fields, and finally return the result of the REST call, and let your lower level resolvers handle parsing it into the shape the data was requested in.
Parsing the info object can be a PITA, although there's libraries out there for that, at least in the Node ecosystem.