Stitch API

4.4. Integrating Stitch API

This section is aimed at helping you integrate the Stitch API into your application. This section assumes that you've already Integrated Stitch SSO. As there are a vast number of GraphQL libraries and frameworks, this section will aim to first cover some of the general principles behind making GraphQL requests before listing some platform-specific libraries.

The Anatomy of a GraphQL Request

The GraphQL specification is agnostic to the transport used to interact with the backend server, however, due to the ubiquity of HTTP, an informal standard has emerged which describes how a server which supports GraphQL should behave over HTTP. A number of libraries have implemented this standard, but this section describes how you might implement a client that can communicate with the Stitch API.

While our server supports HTTP GETs, to make implementation simpler, we'd recommend that all GraphQL queries are made using an HTTP POST request.

We'll need to add an Authorization header (with value Bearer {{STORED_ACCESS_TOKEN}} ) to every request so that the Stitch API will accept the connection.

Request and Response bodies both have the application/json content type, are UTF-8 encoded, and support gzip.

For example, here is a valid graphql request body served over HTTP:

1{
2  "query": "query AccountBalanceQuery($accountId:ID!) {\nnode(id: $accountId) {\n...on BankAccount {\ncurrentBalance\navailableBalance\n}}}",
3  "variables": {
4    "accountId": "NDhjNDhmNzctOGI0NC00Yjg1LWI2YzItODdkZWJkMjYwYmNj"
5  },
6  "operationName": "AccountBalanceQuery"
7}

The query above would return the following values:

1{
2  "data": {
3    "currentBalance": {
4      "quantity": "9001.05",
5      "currency": "ZAR"
6    },
7    "availableBalance": {
8      "quantity": "8991.62",
9      "currency": "ZAR"
10    }
11  }
12}

More reading

For more information about integrating with a GraphQL API from scratch, please see the following section of the GraphQL website: GraphQL - Serving over HTTP

Helpful GraphQL Libraries

While it is easy enough to query a GraphQL API using standard HTTP libraries, it is often more convenient to use dedicated libraries for this purpose. Many of them contain features that help correctly type the return types of features, and enable potential query optimizations.

Here are a list of some useful GraphQL libraries:

Awesome GraphQL is a repository that lists a lot more useful GraphQL libraries and tools. It is likely that your platform will have at least one or two libraries within the list.