Modelling one-to-many table relationships¶

Introduction¶

A one-to-many relationship between two tables can be established via a foreign key constraint.

Say we have the following two tables in our database schema:

authors (
  id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  name TEXT
)

articles (
  id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  author_id INT
  title TEXT
  ...
)

These two tables are related via a one-to-many relationship. i.e:

• an author can have many articles
• an article has one author

Step 1: Set up a table relationship in the database¶

This one-to-many relationship can be established in the database by:

1. Adding a foreign key constraint from the articles table to the authors table using the author_id and id columns of the tables respectively.

This will ensure that the value of author_id column in the articles table is present in the id column of the authors table.

Step 2: Set up GraphQL relationships¶

To access the nested objects via the GraphQL API, create the following relationships:

• Array relationship, articles from authors table using articles :: author_id  ->  id
• Object relationship, author from articles table using author_id -> authors :: id

Query using one-to-many relationships¶

We can now:

• fetch a list of authors with their articles:

  query {
    authors {
      id
      name
      articles {
        id
        title
      }
    }
  }
  

  query { authors { id name articles { id title } } }

  { "data": { "authors": [ { "id": 1, "name": "Justin", "articles": [ { "id": 15, "title": "vel dapibus at" }, { "id": 16, "title": "sem duis aliquam" } ] }, { "id": 2, "name": "Beltran", "articles": [ { "id": 2, "title": "a nibh" }, { "id": 9, "title": "sit amet" } ] } ] } }

• fetch a list of articles with their author:

  query {
    articles {
      id
      title
      author {
        id
        name
      }
    }
  }
  

  query { articles { id title author { id name } } }

  { "data": { "articles": [ { "id": 1, "title": "sit amet", "author": { "id": 4, "name": "Anjela" } }, { "id": 2, "title": "a nibh", "author": { "id": 2, "name": "Beltran" } } ] } }

Insert using one-to-many relationships¶

We can now:

• insert an author with their articles where the author might already exist (assume unique name for author):

mutation UpsertAuthorWithArticles {
  insert_author(objects: {
    name: "Felix",
    articles: {
      data: [
        {
          title: "Article 1",
          content: "Article 1 content"
        },
        {
          title: "Article 2",
          content: "Article 2 content"
        }
      ]
    }
  },
    on_conflict: {
      constraint: author_name_key,
      update_columns: [name]
    }
  ) {
    returning {
      name
      articles {
        title
        content
      }
    }
  }
}

• insert articles with their author where the author might already exist (assume unique name for author):

mutation upsertArticleWithAuthors {
  insert_article(objects: [
    {
      title: "Article 1",
      content: "Article 1 content",
      author: {
        data: {
          name: "Alice"
        },
        on_conflict: {
          constraint: author_name_key,
          update_columns: [name]
        }
      }
    },
    {
      title: "Article 2",
      content: "Article 2 content",
      author: {
        data: {
          name: "Alice"
        },
        on_conflict: {
          constraint: author_name_key,
          update_columns: [name]
        }
      }
    }
  ]) {
    returning {
      title
      content
      author {
        name
      }
    }
  }
}