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A Practical Guide to GraphQL: From the Client Perspective

GraphQL Pagination

Understand how to implement pagination in GraphQL queries to efficiently fetch large lists of data from GitHub’s API. Learn about cursor-based pagination, use of first and after arguments, and meta information like pageInfo and totalCount to support features like infinite scrolling and successive data retrieval.

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Why Do we Need Pagination?

This is where we return to the concept of pagination mentioned in the previous chapter. Imagine we have a list of repositories in our GitHub organization, but we only want to retrieve a few of them to display on our UI. It could take ages to fetch a list of repositories from a large organization. In GraphQL, you can request paginated data by providing arguments to a list field, such as an argument that specifies how many items you are expecting from the list.

Node.js
query OrganizationForLearningReact {
  organization(login: "the-road-to-learn-react") {
    name
    url
    repositories(first: 2) {
      edges {
        node {
          name
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

An argument, namely first, is passed to the repositories list field that specifies how many items from the list are expected in the result. The query shape doesn’t need to follow the edges and node structure, but it’s one from a few solutions to define paginated data structures and lists with GraphQL. Actually, it follows the ...