Render HTML responses about graphiql

[leebyron]

Could you give me more info about the use-case? What is the case when a GraphQL endpoint returns HTML?

[devknoll]

Ah, right, sorry. I'm specifically thinking for development. Seems also possible that proxy/network (think Cloudflare) errors might cause an occasional non-JSON response.

At the very least, some indication that it tried to run the query and something failed might be nice.

[gre]

I guess GraphiQL could print somewhere (in footer bar) the status of the last call to the fetcher. If fetcher returns a failure (or the result is not a json) we could print an error message somewhere

[jimthedev]

I have a use-case for this but perhaps it is too specific to express-graphql and graphiql. Consider you've got a server that requires a login before getting to the Graphiql UI. To accomplish this you've got an array of middleware passed to a custom express route. Your auth middleware comes first and performs an auth session check. Graphql-express is the second middleware in the array. Let's assume for these purposes that this is because you only want Graphiql to be available to staff or a developer group. If the currently logged in user has a session timeout occur while they are using Graphiql then chances are you're either going to return a login form (html) or something like a 403 Forbidden / Access Denied. Currently if you return html then Graphiql actually chokes on parsing, but if instead you return a 403 then it does nothing and errors to the console.

In my case I'd ideally like to be able able to define a mapping of http codes to redirects or at least define a set of errors to display to the user in certain scenarios.

// Ensure authed is just a middleware that redirects you to a login page if you don't have access to the editor
// Grahql is just express-graphql

app.use('/editor', [ensureAuthed, graphqlHTTP((req, res) => ({
  schema: schema,
  rootValue: { 
    session: req.session,
    myapi: axios.create({
      baseURL: 'https://myapi.net/api/',
      timeout: 1000,
      headers: { 'Authorization': req.session.access_token }
    })
  },
  graphiql: true
}))]);

[jimthedev]

Looks like returning a string or json will work for my case, I'll just instruct users to log back in. Would be great to be able to provide a link, but alas, security. :)