Demo: GraphQL and Entity Framework

This demonstration presents a simple movie catalog with a GraphQL-based API.

Technology stack

This demo uses the following technologies:

• Docker & Docker Compose
• SQL Server on Linux
• .NET Core 6.0
• ASP.NET Core Web API
• Hot Chocolate GraphQL framework
• Entity Framework Core (with Migrations and Compiled Models)
• MediatR
• FluentValidations

Running the demo

To run the application, the following prerequirements should be met:

• Docker Desktop (or a Linux equivalent with Docker host, client and Docker Compose plugin)
• .NET Core SDK 6.0 or later
• Entity Framework Core .NET Command-line Tools (link)
• ASP.NET Core runtime 6.0
• Visual Studio Code
• cUrl (or an equivalent tool)

After installing the prerequirements, follow these instructions:

1. Checkout the source
2. Open the folder in VS Code
3. Install the recommended extensions
4. Open a shell prompt, and issue docker compose --project-directory "src" up -d
   • The application auto-creates the database if it doesn't exist yet
5. (If on Linux) Make the deploy/deployInitialData.sh executable, and issue ./deploy/deployInitialData.sh
6. (If on Windows) Import the collection from deploy/Postman_collection.json, and use the "Upload initial data" request to send deploy/movies-compact.json to the server
7. Open a browser window, navigate to localhost:32741 and start running GraphQL queries (filters & sorting also supported)
8. Issue docker compose --project-directory "src" stop to stop the containers

Notes

Filtering movies by genre during a query does not work. There's likely something wrong in the value comparer implementation, and likely a different kind of persistence mechanism is required in order for it to work correctly.

Validation errors trapped by FluentValidation do not appear in the console output.