dotansimha/experimental-stuff

Experiment

This repo demonstrate a local GraphQL layer on top of SQLite, with the capability of managing multiple data stores that are dynamically created, and can be queried/mutated dynamically with GraphQL CRUD operations.

Architecture

flowchart TB
    app_api[Application API]-->|Static GraphQL|app_db
    store_api[Store API]-->|Dynamic GraphQL|store_db

    subgraph "Application Flow"
    mobile_app[Mobile App]-->|blocks,pages,store info|app_api
    ui_comp[UI Table Component]-->|create store|app_api
    ui_comp-->|access store|store_api
    end

    subgraph "Storage"
    app_db[Local SQLite]
    store_db[...N stores]
    end

Notes

1. The application data management is a hand-written GraphQL schema, it makes it easier to adjust to the app needs, instead of depending on a generated schema.
2. There are multiple SQLite databases here: one for the app, and N amount of databases created per each store.
3. The application database holds records of all pages, blocks and everything else needed for managing the data. The block of type Table is a good reference for a table that has it's own data model.
4. The type=table datamodel is represented with a Subgraph definition, stored as part of the table block.
5. When the app needs to interact with a specific type=table block, it asks the application API for a store object. The store object provides a dynamically created GraphQL schema and a new SQLite created for that store. This way the Subgraph is always the source of truth for the store model. This could be also useful with a simple CRUD API, to simplify the need to generate queries, it can be as simple as: getStore("store_store").entity("purpose").create({...}).
6. Using the Subgraph definition as the source of truth gives us the following possibilites in the future:
   1. We can easily sync it remotely with other databases.
   2. We can use graphql-inspector to detect breaking changes in the data model, and have better visibility on the changes.
   3. We can reuse the definition later for more purposes.