Mocking

The strongly-typed nature of a GraphQL API lends itself extremely well to mocking. This is an important part of a GraphQL-First development process, because it enables frontend developers to build out UI components and features without having to wait for a backend implementation.

Even with a backend that is already built, mocking allows you to test your UI without waiting on slow database requests or building out a component harness with a tool like React Storybook.

Default mock example#

Let's take a look at how we can mock a GraphQL schema with just one line of code, using the default mocking logic you get out of the box with graphql-tools.

To start, let's grab the schema definition string from the makeExecutableSchema example in the "Generating a schema" article.

import { makeExecutableSchema } from '@graphql-tools/schema';
import { addMocksToSchema } from '@graphql-tools/mock';
import { graphql } from 'graphql';

// Fill this in with the schema string
const schemaString = `...`;

// Make a GraphQL schema with no resolvers
const schema = makeExecutableSchema({ typeDefs: schemaString });

// Create a new schema with mocks
const schemaWithMocks = addMocksToSchema({ schema });

const query = `
query tasksForUser {
  user(id: 6) { id, name }
}
`;

graphql(schemaWithMocks, query).then((result) => console.log('Got result', result));

Note: If your schema has custom scalar types, you still need to define the __serialize, __parseValue, and __parseLiteral functions, and pass them inside the second argument to makeExecutableSchema.

This mocking logic simply looks at your schema and makes sure to return a string where your schema has a string, a number for a number, etc. So you can already get the right shape of result. But if you want to use the mocks to do sophisticated testing, you will likely want to customize them to your particular data model.

Customizing mocks#

This is where the mocks option comes in, it's an object that describes your desired mocking logic. This is similar to the resolverMap in makeExecutableSchema, but has a few extra features aimed at mocking.

It allows you to specify functions that are called for specific types in the schema, for example:

{
  Int: () => 6,
  Float: () => 22.1,
  String: () => 'Hello',
}

You can also use this to describe object types, and the fields can be functions too:

{
  Person: () => ({
    name: casual.name,
    age: () => casual.integer(0, 120),
  }),
}

In this example, we are using casual, a fake data generator for JavaScript, so that we can get a different result every time the field is called. You might want to use a collection of fake objects, or a generator that always uses a consistent seed, if you are planning to use the data for testing.

Mocking Custom Scalar Types#

In order to Mock Custom Scalar Types, you need to declare them in your Schema. Let's look at an example for declaring DateTime Custom Scalar in our Schema:

const schema = `
  scalar DateTime

  // Your Schema definitions below.
  ...

  ...
`;

This will make DateTime Custom Scalar available to be used in the Schema.

The next step is to define a function that returns a value (fixed or random) for the Custom Scalar. Look at the following example, in which we're mocking a fixed value for the DateTime Custom Scalar Type:

{
  DateTime: () => '2011-01-05T17:08:49.000-0430'
}

Similarly, if you want to mock a random value for the Custom Scalar, you can use a library. We're using casual, as in the example above:

{
  DateTime: () => casual.date(format = 'YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.SSSZZ') // Output Example: 2011-11-11T11:43:31.000-0430
}

The final step is to use the mocks object and schema to mock the server.

import { addMocksToSchema, mockServer } from '@graphql-tools/mock';
// Mock object.
const mocks = {
  Int: () => 6,
  Float: () => 22.1,
  String: () => 'Hello',
  DateTime: () => casual.date(format = 'YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.SSSZZ')
};
const preserveResolvers = false;
// Mock the server passing the schema, mocks object and preserverResolvers arguments.
const server = mockServer(schema, mocks, preserveResolvers);
// Alternatively, you can call addMocksToSchema with the same arguments.
const schemaWithMocks = addMocksToSchema({
  schema,
  mocks,
  preserveResolvers,
});

Now, when you make a Query which response contains the DateTime Scalar Type, the DateTime function will return a value for it.

Using MockList in resolvers#

You can also use the MockList constructor to automate mocking a list:

{
  Person: () => ({
    // a list of length between 2 and 6 (inclusive)
    friends: () => new MockList([2,6]),
    // a list of three lists of two items: [[1, 1], [2, 2], [3, 3]]
    listOfLists: () => new MockList(3, () => new MockList(2)),
  }),
}

In more complex schemas, MockList is helpful for randomizing the number of entries returned in lists.

For example, this schema:

type Usage {
  account: String!
  summary: [Summary]!
}

type Summary {
  date: String!
  cost: Float!
}

By default, the summary field will always return 2 entries. To change this, we can add a mock resolver with MockList as follows:

{
  Usage: () =>({
    summary: () => new MockList([0, 12]),
  }),
}

Now the mock data will contain between zero and 12 summary entries.

Accessing arguments in mock resolvers#

Since the mock functions on fields are actually just GraphQL resolvers, you can use arguments and context in them as well:

{
  Person: () => ({
    // the number of friends in the list now depends on numPages
    paginatedFriends: (root, { numPages }) => new MockList(numPages * PAGE_SIZE),
  }),
}

You can read some background and flavor on this approach in our blog post, "Mocking your server with one line of code".

Mocking interfaces#

You will need resolvers to mock interfaces. By default addMocksToSchema will overwrite resolver functions. By setting the property preserveResolvers on the options object to true, the type resolvers will be preserved.

import { makeExecutableSchema } from '@graphql-tools/schema';
import { addMocksToSchema } from '@graphql-tools/mock';
import mocks from './mocks' // your mock functions

const typeDefs = `
type Query {
  fetchMore(listType: String!, amount: Int!, offset: Int!): List
}

type Distributor {
  id: Int
  name: String
}

type Product {
  id: Int
  name: String
}

interface List {
  amount: Int
  offset: Int
  total: Int
  remaining: Int
}

type DistributorList implements List {
  amount: Int
  offset: Int
  total: Int
  remaining: Int
  items: [Distributor]
}

type ProductList implements List {
  amount: Int
  offset: Int
  total: Int
  remaining: Int
  items: [Product]
}
`

const resolvers = {
  List: {
    __resolveType(data) {
      return data.typename // typename property must be set by your mock functions
    }
  }
}

const schema = makeExecutableSchema({
  typeDefs,
  resolvers
})

const schemaWithMocks = addMocksToSchema({
  schema,
  mocks,
  preserveResolvers: true
})

Mocking a schema using introspection#

The GraphQL specification allows clients to introspect the schema with a special set of types and fields that every schema must include. The results of a standard introspection query can be used to generate an instance of GraphQLSchema which can be mocked as explained above.

This helps when you need to mock a schema defined in a language other than JS, for example Go, Ruby, or Python.

To convert an introspection query result to a GraphQLSchema object, you can use the buildClientSchema utility from the graphql package.

import { buildClientSchema } from 'graphql';
import * as introspectionResult from 'schema.json';

const schema = buildClientSchema(introspectionResult);

const schemaWithMocks = addMocksToSchema({schema});

API#

addMocksToSchema#

import { addMocksToSchema } from '@graphql-tools/mock';

const schemaWithMocks = addMocksToSchema({
  schema,
  mocks: {},
  preserveResolvers: false,
});

Given an instance of GraphQLSchema and a mock object, addMocksToSchema returns a new schema that can return mock data for any valid query that is sent to the server. If mocks is not passed, the defaults will be used for each of the scalar types. If preserveResolvers is set to true, existing resolvers will not be overwritten to provide mock data. This can be used to mock some parts of the server and not others.

MockList#

import { MockList } from '@graphql-tools/mock';

new MockList(length: number | number[], mockFunction: (...args: any[]) => any);

This is an object you can return from your mock resolvers which calls the mockFunction once for each list item. The first argument can either be an exact length, or an inclusive range of possible lengths for the list, in case you want to see how your UI responds to varying lists of data.

mockServer#

import { mockServer } from '@graphql-tools/mock';

// This can be an SDL schema string (eg the result of `buildClientSchema` above)
// or a GraphQLSchema object (eg the result of `buildSchema` from `graphql`)
const schema = `...`

// Same mocks object that `addMocksToSchema` takes above
const mocks = {}
preserveResolvers = false

const server = mockServer(schemaString, mocks, preserveResolvers);

const query = `{ __typename }`
const variables = {}

server.query(query, variables)
  .then(response => {
    console.log(response)
  })

mockServer is just a convenience wrapper on top of addMocksToSchema. It adds your mock resolvers to your schema and returns a client that will correctly execute your query with variables. Note: when executing queries from the returned server, context and root will both equal {}.