JavaScript HTTP Client

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A Dgraph client implementation for JavaScript using HTTP. It supports both browser and Node.js environments. This client follows the Dgraph JavaScript gRPC client closely.

The official JavaScript HTTP client can be found here. Follow the install instructions to get it up and running.

Supported versions

More details on the supported versions can be found at this link.

Quickstart

Build and run the simple project, which contains an end-to-end example of using the Dgraph JavaScript HTTP client. Follow the instructions in the README of that project.

Using a client

You can find a simple example project, which contains an end-to-end working example of how to use the JavaScript HTTP client, for Node.js >= v6.

Create a client

A DgraphClient object can be initialized by passing it a list of DgraphClientStub clients as arguments. Connecting to multiple Dgraph servers in the same cluster allows for better distribution of workload.

The following code snippet shows just one connection.

const dgraph = require("dgraph-js-http")

const clientStub = new dgraph.DgraphClientStub(
  // addr: optional, default: "http://localhost:8080"
  "http://localhost:8080",
  // legacyApi: optional, default: false. Set to true when connecting to Dgraph v1.0.x
  false,
)
const dgraphClient = new dgraph.DgraphClient(clientStub)

To facilitate debugging, debug mode can be enabled for a client.

Login into Dgraph

If your Dgraph server has Access Control Lists enabled (Dgraph v1.1 or above), the clientStub must be logged in for accessing data:

await clientStub.login("groot", "password")

Calling login will obtain and remember the access and refresh JWT tokens. All subsequent operations via the logged in clientStub will send along the stored access token.

Access tokens expire after 6 hours, so in long-lived apps (e.g. business logic servers) you need to login again on a periodic basis:

// When no parameters are specified the clientStub uses existing refresh token
// to obtain a new access token.
await clientStub.login()

Configure access tokens

Some Dgraph configurations require extra access tokens. Alpha servers can be configured with Secure Alter Operations. In this case the token needs to be set on the client instance:

dgraphClient.setAlphaAuthToken("My secret token value")

Create https connection

If your cluster is using TLS/mTLS you can pass a node https.Agent configured with you certificates as follows:

const https = require("https")
const fs = require("fs")
// read your certificates
const cert = fs.readFileSync("./certs/client.crt", "utf8")
const ca = fs.readFileSync("./certs/ca.crt", "utf8")
const key = fs.readFileSync("./certs/client.key", "utf8")

// create your https.Agent
const agent = https.Agent({
  cert,
  ca,
  key,
})

const clientStub = new dgraph.DgraphClientStub(
  "https://localhost:8080",
  false,
  { agent },
)
const dgraphClient = new dgraph.DgraphClient(clientStub)

Alter the database

To set the schema, pass the schema to DgraphClient#alter(Operation) method.

const schema = "name: string @index(exact) ."
await dgraphClient.alter({ schema: schema })

NOTE: Many of the examples here use the await keyword which requires async/await support which isn’t available in all javascript environments. For unsupported environments, the expressions following await can be used just like normal Promise instances.

Operation contains other fields as well, including drop predicate and drop all. Drop all is useful if you wish to discard all the data, and start from a clean slate, without bringing the instance down.

// Drop all data including schema from the Dgraph instance. This is useful
// for small examples such as this, since it puts Dgraph into a clean
// state.
await dgraphClient.alter({ dropAll: true })

Create a transaction

To create a transaction, call DgraphClient#newTxn() method, which returns a new Txn object. This operation incurs no network overhead.

It is good practice to call Txn#discard() in a finally block after running the transaction. Calling Txn#discard() after Txn#commit() is a no-op and you can call Txn#discard() multiple times with no additional side-effects.

const txn = dgraphClient.newTxn()
try {
  // Do something here
  // ...
} finally {
  await txn.discard()
  // ...
}

You can make queries read-only and best effort by passing options to DgraphClient#newTxn. For example:

const options = { readOnly: true, bestEffort: true }
const res = await dgraphClient.newTxn(options).query(query)

Read-only transactions are useful to increase read speed because they can circumvent the usual consensus protocol. Best effort queries can also increase read speed in read bound system. Please note that best effort requires readonly.

Run a mutation

Txn#mutate(Mutation) runs a mutation. It takes in a Mutation object, which provides two main ways to set data: JSON and RDF N-Quad. You can choose whichever way is convenient.

We define a person object to represent a person and use it in a Mutation object.

// Create data.
const p = {
  name: "Alice",
}

// Run mutation.
await txn.mutate({ setJson: p })

For a more complete example with multiple fields and relationships, look at the [simple] project in the examples folder.

For setting values using N-Quads, use the setNquads field. For delete mutations, use the deleteJson and deleteNquads fields for deletion using JSON and N-Quads respectively.

Sometimes, you only want to commit a mutation, without querying anything further. In such cases, you can use Mutation#commitNow = true to indicate that the mutation must be immediately committed.

// Run mutation.
await txn.mutate({ setJson: p, commitNow: true })

Run a query

You can run a query by calling Txn#query(string). You will need to pass in a GraphQL+- query string. If you want to pass an additional map of any variables that you might want to set in the query, call Txn#queryWithVars(string, object) with the variables object as the second argument.

The response would contain the data field, Response#data, which returns the response JSON.

Let’s run the following query with a variable $a:

query all($a: string) {
  all(func: eq(name, $a))
  {
    name
  }
}

Run the query and print out the response:

// Run query.
const query = `query all($a: string) {
  all(func: eq(name, $a))
  {
    name
  }
}`
const vars = { $a: "Alice" }
const res = await dgraphClient.newTxn().queryWithVars(query, vars)
const ppl = res.data

// Print results.
console.log(`Number of people named "Alice": ${ppl.all.length}`)
ppl.all.forEach((person) => console.log(person.name))

This should print:

Number of people named "Alice": 1
Alice

Commit a transaction

A transaction can be committed using the Txn#commit() method. If your transaction consisted solely of calls to Txn#query or Txn#queryWithVars, and no calls to Txn#mutate, then calling Txn#commit() is not necessary.

An error will be returned if other transactions running concurrently modify the same data that was modified in this transaction. It is up to the user to retry transactions when they fail.

const txn = dgraphClient.newTxn()
try {
  // ...
  // Perform any number of queries and mutations
  // ...
  // and finally...
  await txn.commit()
} catch (e) {
  if (e === dgraph.ERR_ABORTED) {
    // Retry or handle exception.
  } else {
    throw e
  }
} finally {
  // Clean up. Calling this after txn.commit() is a no-op
  // and hence safe.
  await txn.discard()
}

Check request latency

To see the server latency information for requests, check the extensions.server_latency field from the Response object for queries or from the Assigned object for mutations. These latencies show the amount of time the Dgraph server took to process the entire request. It does not consider the time over the network for the request to reach back to the client.

// queries
const res = await txn.queryWithVars(query, vars)
console.log(res.extensions.server_latency)
// { parsing_ns: 29478,
//  processing_ns: 44540975,
//  encoding_ns: 868178 }

// mutations
const assigned = await txn.mutate({ setJson: p })
console.log(assigned.extensions.server_latency)
// { parsing_ns: 132207,
//   processing_ns: 84100996 }

Debug mode

Debug mode can be used to print helpful debug messages while performing alters, queries and mutations. It can be set using theDgraphClient#setDebugMode(boolean?) method.

// Create a client.
const dgraphClient = new dgraph.DgraphClient(...);

// Enable debug mode.
dgraphClient.setDebugMode(true);
// OR simply dgraphClient.setDebugMode();

// Disable debug mode.
dgraphClient.setDebugMode(false);