[Federation Feature Proposal]: Pass data to entity resolvers without exposing the data publicly.

[apollographql]

[Federation Feature Proposal]: Pass data to entity resolvers without exposing the data publicly.

[paulpdaniels]

Introduce a new directive to mark fields and types as private.
directive @Private on FIELD_DEFINITION | OBJECT

Was going to open an issue, glad I searched first. I just ran into this issue as well and would like the ability to selectively declare certain fields as private (or scoped) such that we can use them when talking across service boundaries but remain hidden from introspection and external use.

[mcohen75]

@mcohen75 Does apollographql/apollo-server#2812 sound like it may parallel the ideas you're suggesting here?

Yes, it does. One key difference here is that I've proposed that the same directive should apply to types as well. This will enable nesting to avoid muddling a type with parameters that are out of place.

[mcohen75]

@trevor-scheer @abernix I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about something like this. I'm willing to help implement this if it's a direction that you think makes sense.

[Superd22]

Just fyi, I was under the impression that this was on the roadmap in the form of an Internal directive. but cannot find any mention of it besides that comment

[mcohen75]

Thanks @Superd22 for referencing that comment! I haven't been following the federation-demo project so was not aware of these plans. Hopefully this issue will serve as a useful place to discuss this feature.

[abernix]

@mcohen75 Does https://github.com/apollographql/apollo-server/issues/2812 sound like it may parallel the ideas you're suggesting here?

[benkeil]

You could solve this with a workaround. Given the channel API returns an accountRef field you can do:

Schema:

type Account {
    id: String
}
type Channel {
    account: Account
}

The account Field resolver in the channel resolver:

export const account = (parent: Channel & { accountRef: string }, _: any, context: Context): Account => (
  {
    id: parent.accountRef,
  }
);