Impossibility to return a Deferred Array

[bmfs]

I'm making use of the webonyx/graphql-php Deferred type as I find them more intuitive to use than the prefetch option.

However I'm having trouble returning an Deferred type in a field which is supposed to be an array.

As a temporary solution, I'm returning an Array of Deferred, but I find this suboptimal, has the deferred value could resolve to null, and I would end up with null values in an array.

Is it possible to return a Deferred Array?

An example schema would be:

type Purchase {
   id: ID!
   item: [PurchaseItem]
}

type PurchaseItem {
    product_id: String
    quantity: Int
}

In this scenario, I want want to defer the resolution of Purchase.item.

[moufmouf]

Oh! It never occured to me that you could return a Deferred in a GraphQLite field. Does it work? :)

Indeed, the "prefetch" option is supposed to be used in those cases (I always thought this was the only option and never realized you could do this with a Deferred!)

Out of curiosity, what syntax would you like to use (in an ideal world) to declare an array of deferred?

[bmfs]

Ah :) Yeap, It works great. At least never noticed a problem until now.
The only problem I faced so far was with returning a Deferred for an array type.
When outputting, validations expect the value to be iterable + it actually tries to iterate the deferred object.

In the ideal world I wouldn't need to do anything. Internally, it would check if it was a deferred and post pone the validation and any further work.
Without much knowledge on how graphqlite works, my guess is that isn't so simple to implement , since Deferreds are only resolved at the graphql-php level.

[oojacoboo]

Is this really something we should be considering as part of this lib? How would Deferred objects be detected? AFAIK there aren't any native Deferred interfaces.