Connecting The Server and Database with Prisma Client

In this section, you’re going to learn how to connect your GraphQL server to your database using Prisma, which provides the interface to your database. This connection is implemented via Prisma Client, which you used last chapter for the link.findMany() and link.create() queries.

Wiring up your GraphQL schema with Prisma Client

The first thing you need to do is import your generated Prisma Client library and wire up the GraphQL server so that you can access the database queries that your new Prisma Client exposes. For this you will use the third argument in a resolver function, the context argument.

Remember how we said earlier that all GraphQL resolver functions always receive four arguments? You’ve already learned about parent and args, now it’s time to get familiar with the context argument!

The context argument is a plain JavaScript object that every resolver in the resolver chain can read from and write to. Thus, it is basically a means for resolvers to communicate. A really helpful feature is that you can already write to the context at the moment when the GraphQL server itself is being initialized.

This means that you can attach an instance of Prisma Client to the context when initializing the server and then access it from inside our resolvers via the context argument!

That’s all a bit theoretical, so let’s see how it looks in action 💻

Hooking up PrismaClient to the resolver context

For code modularity, you will create a dedicated file for initializing the context. This will be called context.ts.

Now you will create the context object and attach the PrismaClient to it.

You’re following a fairly standard TypeScript workflow here of defining a type or interface and then creating the object. Let’s go through the numbered comments:

• // 1: First you have defined the Context interface, which specifies what objects will be attached to the context object. Right now it’s just an instance of PrismaClient, but this can change as the project grows.
• // 2: You’re exporting the context object, so that it can be imported and used by the GraphQL server.

Now, you will configure Nexus to know the type of your GraphQL context by adjusting the configuration of makeSchema in src/schema.ts.