Apollo Cache is Your Friend, If You Get To Know It

Apollo Cache is Your Friend, If You Get To Know It

摘要

Currently Shopify is going through the process of updating from the Apollo GraphQL client 2 to client 3. The Apollo client is a library used to query your GraphQL services from the frontend, it has a feature for caching objects/queries you’ve already made which will be the focus of this post. Through the process of migrating the Apollo client we started to discuss bugs we've run into in the past, for which a common thread was misuse, or more likely a misunderstanding of the cache. This was the catalyst for me diving further into the cache and exploring how it fetches, transforms, and stores data that we previously queried. Having worked with the Apollo client for the vast majority of my career, I still couldn’t say I understood exactly what was happening in the cache internally. So I felt compelled to find out. In this post, I’ll focus on the Apollo client cache and the life cycle of objects that are cached within it.