Allow genqlient types to be marshaled safely (#120)

## Summary:
When genqlient generates output types, it generates whatever code is
necessary to unmarshal them.  Conversely, when it generates input types,
it generates whatever code is necessary to marshal.  This is all that's
needed for genqlient itself: it never needs to marshal output types or
unmarshal input types.

But maybe you do!  (For example, to put the responses in a cache, which
is the use case that @csilvers hit at Khan, although there are others
one can imagine.)  While we can't support every serialization format you
might want (at least not without adding plugins or some such), it's not
unreasonable to expect that since genqlient can read JSON, it can write
it too.  Sadly, in the past this was not true for types requiring custom
unmarshaling logic, for several reasons.

In this commit I implement logic to always write both marshalers and
unmarshalers whenever they're needed to be able to correctly round-trip
the types, even though genqlient doesn't do so.  I wasn't starting from
scratch, since of course we already write both marshalers and
unmarshalers in some cases.  But this ended up requiring surprisingly
large changes on the marshaling side, mostly to correctly support
embedding (which we use for named fragments).

Specifically, as the comments in `types.go` discuss, the most difficult
issue is spreads with duplicate fields, which translate to Go embedded
fields which end up hidden from the json-marshaler.  Ultimately, I had
to do things quite differently from unmarshaling, and essentially
flatten the type when we write marshaler.  But in the end it's not so
ugly -- indeed arguably it's cleaner!  Mainly it's just different.

One thing to note is that we do marshal `__typename` based on
what we know about the types; users need not fill it in (and if they
do we'll ignore it).  This seemed to me to be a better UX, and
didn't add much complexity.

In general, I begin to wonder whether using `encoding/json` at all is
really right for genqlient: we're doing a lot of work to appease it,
despite knowing what our types look like.  I think it would still be a
significant increase in lines of code to roll our own, but that code
would perhaps be simpler, and would surely be faster (although if we
just want the speed gains we could use another JSON-generator library,
see also #47).  Anyway, something to think about in the future.

## Test plan:
make tesc


Author: benjaminjkraft

Reviewers: csilvers, StevenACoffman, benjaminjkraft, dnerdy, aberkan, jvoll, mahtabsabet, MiguelCastillo

Required Reviewers: 

Approved By: StevenACoffman, dnerdy

Checks:  Test (1.17),  Test (1.16),  Test (1.15),  Test (1.14),  Lint,  Test (1.17),  Test (1.16),  Test (1.15),  Test (1.14),  Lint

Pull Request URL: https://github.com/Khan/genqlient/pull/120
This commit is contained in:
Ben Kraft
2021-09-29 10:30:43 -07:00
committed by GitHub
parent 1f65445127
commit f4c981031e
30 changed files with 4143 additions and 180 deletions
+2
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@@ -24,6 +24,8 @@ When releasing a new version:
### New features:
- genqlient's types are now safe to JSON-marshal, which can be useful for putting them in a cache, for example. See the [docs](FAQ.md#-let-me-json-marshal-my-response-objects) for details.
### Bug fixes:
## v0.2.0
+13
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@@ -96,6 +96,19 @@ bindings:
Or, you can bind it to any other type, perhaps one with size-checked constructors; see the [`genqlient.yaml` documentation](`genqlient.yaml`) for more details.
### … let me json-marshal my response objects
This is supported by default! All genqlient-generated types support both JSON-marshaling and unmarshaling, which can be useful for putting them in a cache, inspecting them by hand, using them in mocks (although this is [not recommended](#-test-my-graphql-apis)), or anything else you can do with JSON. It's not guaranteed that marshaling a genqlient type will produce the exact GraphQL input -- we try to get as close as we can but there are some limitations around Go zero values -- but unmarshaling again should produce the value genqlient returned. That is:
```go
resp, err := MyQuery(...)
// not guaranteed to match what the server sent (but close):
b, err := json.Marshal(resp)
// guaranteed to match resp:
var respAgain MyQueryResponse
err := json.Unmarshal(b, &resp)
```
## How do I make a query with …
### … a specific name for a field?