Sitecore GQL not showing template in auto suggestion while using GQL playground

Hi Team,

We all work with GraphQL playground which was new some years back and we were all learning, today i am going to share a scenario which you might face too, So you can get the answer or solution handy with this blog post

Scenario

There are many of our components and code calling GQL, All works fine, but one scenario where it kept showing "Unknown type", There was nothing fancy there and same query and same expectations but it was failing, Below are details of it.

So, The context is i created a template, and also created items from that template.

Now, I had to write GQL just expose those content because our another downstream system will consume that data and use it.

But when i wrote simple query, it kept giving me "Unknown type" error and i was little clueless, Here is what is kept showing.

 Troubleshooting

1) I double checked, If template "RecurringScript" exists with same name in Sitecore

2) I renamed the template just to try but it did not work too

3) Out of the clue i tried searching for some other template and they were showing fine

4) I cleared cache and tried

Solution

Well, to resolve this, It is important how these templates schema is being generated, So first thing what i did was to understand how GQL schemas gets generated

By default schema configuration looks like below in your showconfig.aspx

If you see, the instruction are in place that read the templates on given paths, Now in my case the folder was created outside of whole structure (for some internal purpose).

There are two things you can do here

1) You can define you whole custom schema configuration with your custom paths and your personal GQL Playground endpoint and patch it

2) There is also an option, so if you create any template under "User Defined" folder, It will be considered in schema and you will be able to query normally

To cut the story short, anything that you defined in "AddIncludedPath" configurations, From those locations it will try to generate schema for templates and then you can query them.

So, for my needs, i moved my folder into "User Defined" folder (the folder which i moved had "RecurringScript" template inside it) and restarted the environment.

and now because i moved the folder which had my template into "User Defined" folder and because my GQL schema has that configuration to read from that folder, the error was resolved and i was able to hit the query just fine

Conclusion

GQL is full extensible, you can patch your own schema configuration and give different folder path for your needs, In my next blog i will explain a scenario which could exists in your existing set up too and it might break your components for you too.

For above change, i had one question to Sitecore, What if i want to exclude the paths, so if i have more path in exclusion and less path in inclusion, Having "AddExcludedPath" will help in those scenarios

And Sitecore has taken it as feature request and the tracking number for that request is "DEVEX-2997"