Support explicit order of directives

[expediagroup]

Support explicit order of directives

[d4rken]

Are they not already ordered? AFAIK we process them in annotation order and tthe annotations are arrays/lists. So the order in which they are processed should be either top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top?
We could add a unit-test though that checks this...

[dariuszkuc]

AFAIK neither Kotlin nor Java explicitly specify the order in which annotations are read. This means that while it is true that currently the returned array is in the order that they are defined on the fields there is no guarantee that this might not change in the future.

[dariuszkuc]

I was thinking whether we should do something similar to what Spring does in their usage of Ordered (e.g. using Spring annotations ensuring that we run in transaction @Transactional only if data is not cached using @Cacheable, etc)

[d4rken]

I think java does guarantee ordering and thus Kotlin too.

Functionality wise I also thought about Spring, but I'm not sure we need new annotation for that. We could also add paramters to GraphQLDirective, e.g. priority.

Has this come up in a use-case? I'm not sure we should add this just because java/kotlin could change behavior, that's a bit Pandora's box.

[dariuszkuc]

I did saw that post but it also reiterates that while currently there is an order it is implied indirectly and there is no guarantee it might not change in the future. That being said I've updated the original description to reflect it is exploratory.

[smyrick]

I am also fine not doing anything until we need to. And if we do implement maybe just adding a simple priority: Int

[dariuszkuc]

Closing this as I don't think we'll be doing this anytime soon. We'll reopen if the need arise.